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THE BEAUTY OF 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 


BURRIS JENKINS, D.D. 


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THE BEAUTY O 
THE NEW TESTAME 





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BURRIS ‘JENKINS, D.D. 


Author of “Princess Salome,’ “The Man in the Street 
and Religion, “The Protestant,” etc. 


NEW Gay YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1925, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
ay oc. 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


To the Late 
DR. JOSEPH HENRY THAYER 


of Harvard, whose love of beautiful English 
and beautiful Greek, whose saintly and 
scholarly life, influenced and still influence 
those fortunate enough to have sat at his 
feet, this book is dedicated in loving memory. 






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PREFACE 


Charm and beauty, as well as truth, shine in the 
New Testament. 

We are aware of the literary and artistic value of 
the Old Testament, and, in the past, have felt that no 
culture was complete without some knowledge of the 
Hebrew sacred books. It seems, however, that we 
are not all of us quite aware how important is the 
New Testament, as well, to those who desire familiarity 
with the best in literature. 

The books of the Bible—for the Bible is a library 
made up of many books—are brief, and almost any 
one of them may be read at a single short sitting. This 
practice is to be recommended, as one can obtain a 
better grasp of any document by reading it straight 
through than by sketching isolated paragraphs. Any 
book of the New Testament may be read in the same 
length of time as a modern magazine story or article. 

This volume is written in the hope of stimulating 
reading and appreciation of the books contained in 
the collection called the New Testament. It is hoped, 
however, that one who goes faithfully through these 
pages and reads only the extracts contained in them, 
will have a fairly good idea of the most valuable parts 
of the New Testament. 

It is certain beforehand that somebody’s favorite 
passage will be omitted. It is a pity, but it is impossible 


to quote it all. 
Vii 


viii PREFACE 


The quotations in this volume are from the new 
translation by James Moffatt, issued by George H. 
Doran Company, New York. It is fortunate indeed 
that we should have, in our own modern English, so 
lucid, accurate, and highly literary a version. By 
means of it we are enabled to bring the New Testa- 
ment into touch with our present-day standards of 
taste. In the older versions the “thees and thous” 
of seventeenth-century English tend to blur for us the 
picture. The Moffatt New Testament, furthermore, 
will help us to strip ourselves of old associations that 
cluster around favorite passages and thus bias our 
judgment of their literary value. Use and wont are 
the parents of prejudice. We shall here try to take 
a clean page. 

Most readers, accustomed to the King James ver- 
sion, which has been endeared to them by long use, 
will have difficulty at first, no doubt, in becoming used 
to the modern phraseology of the Moffatt translation. 
In reality, however, the strangeness of this phraseology 
will but aid the reader in forming a just estimate of 
the literary value of these New Testament writings. 
The unaccustomed phraseology and turns of expres- 
sion will capture and enchain the reader’s attention; 
and, in the long run, the more modern translation will 
win its way into his esteem and finally affection. 


CONTENTS 


Book OnE: JESUS IN THE GOSPELS 


CHAPTER 


ARTISTRY IN THE NEw TESTAMENT 
THE BrrtH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 

A CHARACTER-SKETCH—THE BAPTIST . 
Jesus Cuooses His FRIENDs . 

Tue Portry oF JESUS 

SHORT STORIES OF JESUS . : 
SOME BEAUTIFUL MIRACLES OF JESUS . 
SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 

More EpicrAMs oF JESUS 

Jesus DEALING witH MEN 

Jesus DEALING wiTH WoMEN 

THE SUPREME TRAGEDY,—Acrts I Ann II 


THE SUPREME TraAGEDY,—Acts III 
AND IV i 


Two: THE CHURCH IN THE ACTS 


THe BirTH AND INFANCY OF THE 
CHURCH 


DAWNING SENSE OF UNIVERSALITY 
THE GOSPEL CARRIED TO ROME 
ORATORY IN THE EARLY CHURCH . 


THE GREAT PREACHING OF PAUL . 
ix 


PAGE 
13 
18 
30 
36 
48 
5A 
69 
76 
84 
g2 

100 

109 


118 


129 
134 
140 
145 
152 


CONTENTS 


Book THuree: PAUL AND HIS WORLD EVANGEL 


CHAPTER 


XIX 
XX 
XXI 
XXII 
XXIII 


XXIV 


PAUL A WRITER OF LETTERS . 
Wuat SHAPED PAUL’s STYLE 
PAUL’s PLAN OF AN EPISTLE . 
LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 
SoME oF PAUL’s LITERARY Ways . 


PAUL’s LIFE Totp By His LETTERS 


PAGE 


161 
166 
173 
179 
IQI 
199 


Boox Four: LEADING ON TO REVELATION 


XXV 


XXVI 
XXVIT 
XXVIII 
XXIX 


THe ANONYMOUS 


HEBREWS 


LETTER’ TO THE 


Tue Fiery St. JAMES 

LETTERS OF Hope AND LOVE . 
THE GLORIES OF REVELATION . 
Tue Lone Way WE HaAvE ComE . 


Aye 
217 
223 
228 
236 


Book OnE: JESUS IN THE GOSPELS 





Book OnE: JESUS IN THE GOSPELS 


Chapter I 
ARTISTRY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Just as art is beauty in expression, so religion is 
beauty resident within the soul. Art, then, while not 
identical with religion, is the handmaiden of it. To 
speak beautifully, write, sing, paint, carve, or build 
beautifully is to put religion into visible form. To 
live beautifully is naturally the finest of all the fine 
arts; for it is to put religion into flesh and blood, the 
most readable, even if the most perishable, of docu- 
ments. 

It is not surprising, therefore, to find the best ex- 
pressions of religion falling into forms of natural 
beauty. Beauty is the spirit inherent in religion, as 
well as the clothing, the outward covering and drapery 
of religion. The religious literature of the Hebrews, 
—songs, stories, histories, rhapsodies, epics—possesses 
passages of rare beauty and charm. So do the books 
of other religions. The purer and intenser the faith, 
the more beautiful we should expect its expressions to 
be. If we regard the Christian religion as the highest, 
we have the right to look to the literature that enshrines 
it for artistic qualities. 

It is a habit with us to regard the New Testament 


as true. It is not so much a habit to think of it as 
13 


14 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


beautiful. Truth and beauty intertwine. They live 
together, range and work together, die together. The 
gospels, therefore, should contain not only a story of 
importance but one of loveliness. We ought to find, 
as indeed we do find, that the whole story, or the 
short stories embodied in it, the symphony or the 
themes, the entire epic or the lyrics enshrined within 
it, all meet the requirements of the arts. We are con- 
stantly paying unconscious tribute to that beauty by 
quoting it, shaping our lives by it, using it in our paint- 
ings, carvings, buildings. 

It is a habit with us to praise the exalted passages 
in the Old Testament, the gardens of Genesis, the 
springs and oases of Exodus, the stately palms of the 
prophets, and the poignant lyrics of the psalmists; but 
we are not perhaps so mindful of the excellences in the 
story of Jesus, in the narrative of the genesis of the 
Church, in the personal letters of the apostles, in the 
visions of Revelation. 

With all the restraint and skill manifest in the Old 
Testament stories, they are not superior to the simple 
power and beauty in the New Testament. Unity, 
clearness, brevity without sacrifice of the picturesque, 
all the qualities of skillful narration are here. Later 
writers have tried to put these stories into their own 
words for modern consumption, only to show how 
futile is the attempt at duplication or imitation. 

Writers in the first and second centuries issued 
other gospels, enlarging upon or supplementing the 
original four. These “apocryphal” gospels have, some 
of them, come down to us; and their fantastic shoddi- 
ness is apparent. They make of the child Jesus a 


ARTISTRY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 15 


vindictive and mischievous schoolboy, ruthlessly punish- 
ing his rivals, and fashioning birds and animals of 
clay, only to endow them with life and action. These 
apocrypha are valueless, and the centuries have so pro- 
nounced. 

After all, it is the ages which test the value of liter- 
ature as art. Older than most of the classics, the 
Gospels have weathered time, stood the test of centu- 
ries, inspired painters, sculptors, builders, poets and 
musicians. Four short narratives, drawing from com- 
mon sources, and sometimes duplicating each other, 
they manifest a rare power of survival. ‘There are 
hymns of India, beautiful poetry, sayings of Con- 
fucius, clear-eyed ethics, dialogues of Greek philoso- 
phers, and Roman legendry, the Al Koran, and all 
the sacred books of the East; but in all this literature, 
one must search through a great amount of dross to 
find the gold. In the Gospels the gold is easy to find. 

Tested by its effect upon the lives of men, upon the 
institutions, the civilizations of humanity, the New 
Testament reveals its weight. It has shaped Western 
civilization, in ethics, in jurisprudence, in ideals. The 
West may not yet live by it; but the West feels that 
it ought to live by it. Here is testimony to the worth 
of the book. 

Each of the four Gospels has its individuality. The 
Middle Ages adopted certain symbols to characterize 
the four; and these symbols appear in the carvings and 
the stained glass of many churches. A man or an 
angel stands for Matthew, indicating that the Christ 
here set forth is the Saviour, or Messiah, of long 
Hebrew expectation. A lion is for Mark, because of 


16 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


the daring and rapid narrative. An ox or a calf rep- 
resents Luke, because it is the gospel of universal 
salvation for all sinners, no matter what their nation- 
ality. The eagle stands for The Fourth Gospel because 
of its soaring character. 

The first three gospels, called the Synoptics, re- 
semble each other to a degree, and differ markedly 
from the fourth; but even the first three show among 
themselves differences in manner and purpose. Mat- 
thew, written most likely at Jerusalem, is for Jews; 
Mark, at Rome, for Romans; Luke, at Caesarea or per- 
haps Corinth, is for Greeks; and John, at Ephesus, 
for all the world. 

The first three gospels undoubtedly drew from com- 
mon sources—the “Logia of Matthew,” or the speeches 
of Jesus set down in the original Aramaic, underlying 
all three. The Fourth Gospel shows the influence of a 
Greek atmosphere, Greek philosophy, Greek art. It 
dates from late in the first century or possibly even 
from the second century. If written by John, the Be- 
loved Disciple, it flows from his ripest age and from 
the culture he imbibed at Ephesus. If it comes not 
from the hand of John, then some follower of his, 
some faithful disciple who had sat at the feet of the 
white-bearded seer of Patmos, gave to the world this 
account of the gospel story, enshrined in that golden 
atmosphere which even yet hangs over “the glory 
that was Greece.” It is perhaps safe to say that the 
favorite of the four gospels among Bible readers is 
the one that bears the name of John. Doubtless this 
is because it is so colored by the spirit of that people 
whose very religion itself was beauty. 


ARTISTRY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT § 17 


One of our modern poets has drawn for us an imagi- 
native picture of the rise of these narratives in the 
poem, “Before the Gospels Were.” 


“Tong noons and evenings after he was gone, 
Mary, the Mother, Matthew, Luke and John 
And all of those who loved him to the last, 
Went over all the marvel of the past; 

Went over all the old familiar ways, 

With tender talk of dear remembered days. 
They walked the roads that never gave him rest, 
Past Jordan’s ford, past Kedron’s bridge, 

Up Olivet, up Hermon’s ridge, 

To that last road, the one they loved the best. 


So huddling often by the chimney’s blaze, 
Or going down the old remembered ways, 
They held their wonder-talk. 

Minding each other of some sacred spot, 
Minding each other of some word forgot; 

So gathering up till all the whispered words 
Went to the four winds like a flight of birds.” 


Chapter II 
THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 


The stories of the birth and childhood of Jesus, 
brief as they are, reveal the skill and simplicity of 
the narrators. There is restraint when the temptation 
to elaboration and exaggeration is evident. There is 
plain statement when it would have been so easy to 
lapse into sentimentalism. 

The advent of Prince Gautama, the Buddha, Light 
of Asia, the legendary birth of Hiawatha, the hero of 
the children of Manitou the Mighty, the marvelous 
tales of the birth-nights of princes and kings, rather 
suffer by comparison with this simple history. More- 
over, the story sounds true; and the writers reveal 
themselves as sincere. A thing cannot be beautiful 
unless it be true. Truth and beauty go together. Un- 
less a narrative has the ring of truth—what we call 
verisimilitude—it cannot lay claim to be called fine art. 

It is supposed by some that Luke, the physician, 
came to know personally Mary the Mother of Jesus 
in her later years; hence his story of the infancy is 
fuller than that of the others. What Mary thought 
and felt and said are told by him as if he had some 
especial knowledge of these things. 

Before the birth of Jesus, when strange things were 
happening to the young Virgin of Nazaret, she sings 
a song that still lives. Mary leaves her home in Gal- 
ilee to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth—afterward 


mother of John the Baptist—and there, in the hills 
18 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 19 


of Judaea, learns what all these strange things mean. 

With a mingled apprehension and rejoicing in her 
soul, she sings what is now called “The Magnificat,” 
a favorite hymn of the church for centuries. As Luke 
records it in his opening chapter, it contains all the 
national feeling of the songs of Miriam and Deborah, 
with an added strain of universality that foreshadows 
the teaching of the new and Greater Prophet. 


THE SONG OF MARY 


“My soul magnifies the Lord, 
My spirit has joy in God my Saviour: 
for he has considered the humiliation of his servant. 
From this time forth all generations will call me 
blessed, 
for He who is Mighty has done great things for me. 
His name is holy, 
his mercy is on generation after generation, 
for those who reverence him. 
He has done a deed of might with his arm, 
he has scattered the proud with their purposes, 
princes he has dethroned and the poor he has up- 
lifted, 
he has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent 
the rich away empty.” 


The scene shifts to the sheep-dotted valleys south- 
west of Jerusalem, where nestles to this day the city of 
Bethlehem, A Mecca for travelers from all over the 
world, with its church of the Nativity and its fabled 
manger, it glitters with bazaars and shops full of brass 
and leather-goods, of glass jewelry and mother-of- 


20 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


pearl beads made of shells brought from the Red Sea. 
For two thousand years before Christ, Bethlehem stood 
beside the great caravan route from Egypt to the East, 
—the oldest road on earth—and possessed a large inn, 
or khan, one of the largest of the time. Bethlehem is 
supposed to be one of the three oldest towns in the 
world. Phillips Brooks made a lyric about it that 
has become classic: 


“O little town of Bethlehem, 
How still we see thee lie! 
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep 
The silent stars go by; 
Yet in thy dark streets shineth 
The everlasting light; 
The hopes and fears of all the years 
Are met in thee to-night. 


“How silently, how silently, 
The wondrous gift is giv’n! 
So God imparts to human hearts 
The blessings of His Heav’n. 
No ear may hear his coming, 
But in this world of sin, 
Where meek souls will receive him still, 
The dear Christ enters in.” 


THE LOWLY BIRTH 


No little journey in Palestine more satisfies eyes 
and heart than the drive from Jerusalem down to Beth- 
lehem, the very ancient “House of Bread.” Now there 
are wide smooth roads winding through the valleys 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 21 


and round the bases of the Judzean hills; in the day 
of Jesus no doubt the great east and west road pre- 
sented much the same appearance winding through 
the long grasses of the poppy-starred pastures. To 
right and left, as one approaches the birth-place, one 
may see even yet the flocks of sheep grazing beside 
the cloaked figures of their shepherds. There, on the 
hither side of the present city is the well at Bethlehem, 
the well of the boyhood of David, the well for the 
water of which he sighed when a beleaguered outlaw 
fleeing from the anger of Saul, the well to which in 
the night three of his mighty men of valor broke 
through enemy lines, at risk of life, to bring him a 
cruse of water which he refused to drink, pouring it 
out as a libation and saying: “How can I drink the 
blood of my young men?” Here is the ancient well 
that made the town, where shepherds for thousands of 
years had brought their flocks to drink, and where 
they bring them to this day. No man knows where 
the khan, or inn, stood, in the days when Quirinius 
was governor of Syria; but we may be very sure it 
was hard by the well, and that it resembled a hundred 
khans that one encounters in rural spots in the Holy 
Land to-day. 

The song came over the open roof of that great, 
crowded inn and its stable, over the plains hard by 
where shepherds slept beside their flocks that night, 


“Tt came upon the midnight clear, 
That glorious song of old, 

From angels bending near the earth 
To touch their harps of gold: 


22 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


‘Peace to the earth, good-will to men 
From Heaven’s all-gracious King!’ 
The world in solemn stillness lay 
To hear the angels sing.” 


That birth-story has been told over and over by 
skilled literary artists, by poets and golden-mouthed 
orators; but, after all, none has yet surpassed the 
simple strokes of the pen of Luke: 


“Now in those days an edict was issued by Caesar 
Augustus for a census of the whole world. (This was 
the first census, and it took place when Quirinius was 
governor of Syria.) So every one went to be regis- 
tered, each at his own town, and as Joseph belonged 
to the house and family of David he went up from 
Galilee to Judaea, from the town of Nazaret to David’s 
town called Bethlehem, to be registered along with 
Mary his wife. She was pregnant, and while they 
were there the days elapsed for her delivery; she gave 
birth to her first-born son, and as there was no room 
for them inside the khan she wrapped him up and 
laid him in a stall for cattle. There were some shep- 
herds in the district who were out in the fields keeping 
guard over their flocks by night; and an angel of the 
Lord flashed upon them, the glory of the Lord shone 
all round them. They were terribly afraid, but the 
angel said to them, ‘Have no fear. This is good news 
I am bringing you, news of a great joy that is meant 
for all the people. To-day you have a saviour born 
in the town of David, the Lord messiah. And here 
is a proof for you: you will find a baby wrapped up 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 23 


and lying in a stall for cattle. Then a host of 
heaven’s army suddenly appeared beside the angel ex- 
tolling God and saying, 


““Glory to God in high heaven, 
and peace on earth for men whom he favors!’ 


“Now when the angels had left them and gone away 
to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us be 
off to Bethlehem to see this thing that the Lord has 
told us of.’ So they made haste and discovered Mary 
and Joseph and the baby lying in the stall for cattle. 
When they saw this they told people about the word 
which had been spoken to them about the child; all 
who heard it were astonished at the story of the shep- 
herds, and as for Mary, she treasured it all up and 
mused upon it. Then the shepherds went away back, 
glorifying and extolling God for all they had heard 
and seen as they had been told they would.” 


HEROD AND THE MAGI 


What took place that night in the stable of the inn 
touched and affected the upper as well as the lower 
strata of society. Shepherds not only, but also the 
intellectual artistocracy, wise men, came to his cradle, 
and even the political power of jealous Herodian 
princes started up alarmed and drew its bloody sword. 

Lew Wallace, in his Ben Hur, and Henry Van 
Dyke in his Other Wise Man, have painted their pic- 
tures of these magians who came from afar to pay 
their homage to the new-born prince. Scores of others, 


24 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


poets and painters, have taken the story as their theme. 
The mighty pen of Milton has touched it. Addressing 
his own muse he sings: 


“See how from far upon the eastern road 
The star-led wizards haste with odors sweet! 
Oh! run, prevent them with thy humble ode, 
And lay it lowly-at His blessed feet; 
Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet, 
And join thy voice unto the angel choir, 
From out His secret altar touched with hallowed fire.” 


Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar—these are the 
fabled names of the wise men—‘whether from 
Naishapur or Babylon,’ whether from Egypt or 
Greece, were doctors, alchemists, astrologers, wizards, 
men learned in the lore supposed to control the geneal- 
ogies and destinies of kings. Naturally they consid- 
ered it their business when signs seemed to point to 
a prince that should supplant emperors who now ruled 
the world. They came to see. Herod also, the petty 
kinglet, under Rome, thought it his business, too, when 
a new prince broke into his domain. 

No doubt the magi, mounted on camels, while the 
camel-bells chimed in silver tones, met by appointment 
either in their own lands or on the borders of Syria, 
possibly under the oaks of Hebron or the dews of 
Hermon, and, pitching their black tents beside one 
of the great caravan routes that led from Egypt to 
Assyria ory from Rome to Jerusalem, sat down to 
consider their plan of action. At last they came to 
consult Herod, and, distrustful of his black and frown- 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 25 


ing countenance, outwitted him and lent his evil pur- 
pose no aid. Matthew, however, tells this story as 
no other can ever hope to rival. He tells it very 
simply. Emerson once said, “To be great is to be 
simple.” 


“Now when Jesus was born at Bethlehem, belonging 
to Judaea, in the days of King Herod, magicians from 
the East arrived at Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the 
newly-born king of the Jews? We saw his star when 
it rose, and we have come to worship him.’ The news 
of this troubled King Herod and all Jerusalem as well, 
so he gathered all the high priests and scribes of the 
people and made inquiries of them about where the 
messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethle- 
hem belonging to Judaea: for thus it is written by the 
prophet : 


“And you Bethlehem, in Judah’s land, 
You are not least among the rulers of Judah; 
For a ruler will come from you, 
Who will shepherd Israel my people.’ 


“Then Herod summoned the magicians in secret and 
ascertained from them the time of the star’s appear- 
ance. He also sent them to Bethlehem, telling them, 
‘Go and make a careful search for the child, and when 
you have found him report to me, so that I can go 
and worship him too.’ The magicians listened to the 
king and then went their way. And the star they 
had seen rise went in front of them till it stopped 
over the place where the child was. When they caught 


26 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


sight of the star they were intensely glad. And on 
reaching the house they saw the child with his mother 
Mary, they fell down to worship him, and opening 
their caskets they offered him gifts of gold and frank- 
incense and myrrh. Then, as they had been divinely 
warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went 
back to their own country by a different road.” 


MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS 


Tragedy follows hard upon the birth of the young 
Prince, a tragedy as deep as ever thrilled an audience 
in an Athenian theater. The forces of this world, the 
Fates, as the Greeks called them, contending for place 
and power, caught many little lives in their web at 
Bethlehem, and brought mourning to many mothers. 

Warned of the jealousy of the reigning Herod, 
called the Great, Joseph took the child Jesus and his 
Mother away into Egypt. Herod searched Bethlehem 
to find him. Matthew tells of the tragedy with pathetic 
brevity in chapter two: 


“Then Herod saw the magicians had trifled with 
him, and he was furiously angry; he sent and slew 
all the male children in Bethlehem and in all the neigh- 
borhood who were two years old or under, calculating 
by the time he had ascertained from the magicians. 
Then the saying was fulfilled which had been uttered 
by the prophet Jeremiah: 


“““A cry was heard in Rama, 
weeping and sore lamentation— 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS) 27 


Rachel weeping for her children, 
and inconsolable because they are no more.’ ”’ 


The lonely flight into Egypt of the little family of 
three closes the story of the infancy. Mary, still weak- 
ened from her experience, no doubt was shielded by 
the “just man,” her husband, from all possible fatigues, 
and yet, at best, the journey must have racked body 
and soul. Artists have pictured the Holy Family en- 
camped in the shadow of the pyramids, with Mary 
and the babe sleeping in the very arms of the Sphinx. 
Matthew ends the story with a succinct account of the 
return to the hill country of Galilee, when Joseph 
learns that Archelaus reigns in the place of his father, 
Herod. For Luke the narrative closes with the grace- 
ful and simple word: 


“When they had finished all the regulations of the 
law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own 
town of Nazaret. And the child grew and became 
strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the favour of 
God was on him.” 


THE BOY JESUS IN THE TEMPLE 


One further incident, and one only, lightens the 
darkness of the thirty years spent in Nazaret. Jesus, 
the son of a carpenter, himself became a carpenter, 
shaping handles for plows, axes and adzes, and making 
yokes as smooth and easy for the necks of oxen as 
he well could. He grew to rugged and athletic man- 
hood, a great pedestrian and lover of the out-of-doors. 


28 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Richard Burton, a contemporary poet, has sung 
sweetly of “The Carpenter Lad”: 


“His spirit was hale as the sweet, fresh wood 
He used to plane and trim; 
And the little children (who understood), 
They always clung to him; 
He spoke of a dream of Brotherhood— 
Men hung him on a limb.” 


The incident of a visit at twelve years of age to 
the Passover feast at Jerusalem sheds the single ray 
of light into this long dim period of his youth; but 
what an incident! And what illumination it sheds over 
the strange character of the budding genius as well 
as over the tender relations existing between him and 
his father and mother! Heinrich Hoffman has put 
before the eyes of the world his conception of the 
wise-faced boy and the eager, though doubtful and 
enquiring countenances of the scribes and doctors of 
the law, with an effectiveness and an acceptance that 
few pictures have ever attained. Luke alone gives us 
this story, at the close of the second chapter : 


“Every year his parents used to travel to Jerusalem 
at the passover festival; and when he was twelve 
years old they went up as usual to the festival. After 
spending the full number of days they came back, but 
the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents 
did not know of this: they supposed he was in the 
caravan and travelled on for a day, searching for him 
among their kinsfolk and acquaintances. Then, as 


THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS 29 


they failed to find him, they came back to Jersualem 
in search of him. Three days later they found him 
in the temple, seated among the teachers, listening to 
them and asking them questions, till all his hearers 
were amazed at the intelligence of his own answers. 
When his parents saw him they were astounded, and 
his mother said to him, ‘My son, why have you be- 
haved like this to us? Here have your father and I 
been looking for you anxiously! ‘Why did you look 
for me?’ he said. ‘Did you not know I had to be 
at my Father’s house?’ But they did not understand 
what he said. Then he went down along with them 
to Nazaret, and did as they told him. His mother 
treasured up everything in her heart. And Jesus in- 
creased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with 
God and man.” 


So ends the story of the birth and boyhood of Our 
Lord, told only by Matthew and Luke. No other 
stories are so well known; yet none still holds the 
attention of the civilized world after all these years as 
this one does; none has so influenced the world. 


Chapter III 
CHARACTER-SKETCH—THE BAPTIST 


It is one thing to see a character vividly with the 
eye of the imagination, another thing to make the 
reader see. Here lies the difficult task and the fine 
art of the historian, poet, dramatist, or story-teller. 
With swift, sure strokes the evangelists accomplish 
this feat in outlining many of the characters who 
appear in their narratives. Think of Simon Peter, of 
Thomas, of Mary and Martha. The character of John 
the Baptist illustrates this skill, however, perhaps bet- 
ter than any other of the minor personages in the 
gospel-story. The writers suggest rather than elabo- 
rate, and leave much to the reader’s imagination. 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all draw the picture, for 
here all the synoptic gospels unite. “Synoptic” is from 
two Greek words meaning to see together, or alike; 
hence capable of synopsis. Matthew’s account is not 
quite so condensed as Mark’s, and therefore holds 
more detail, more color, is more picturesque. Mark 
here seems more virile and alive than Luke. Mark 
is always nervous, condensed, rapid. Luke is more 
literary than either of the others, and amply justifies 
the word of Ernest Renan, who says, “Luke is the 
most beautiful book that ever existed.” 

For the present purpose of setting before our eyes 
a swift and vivid character-sketch, Matthew’s account, 


fuller and richer in detail, is perhaps best adapted: 
30 


CHARACTER-SKETCH—THE BAPTIST 31 


“In those days John the Baptist came on the scene, 
preaching in the desert of Judaea, ‘Repent, the Reign 
of heaven is near.’ (This was the man spoken of 
by the prophet Isaiah: 

“The voice of one who cries in the desert, ‘Make 
the way ready for the Lord, level the paths for him.’) 

“This John had his clothes made of camel’s hair, 
with a leather girdle round his loins; his food was 
locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and the whole 
of Judaea and all the Jordan-district went out to him 
and got baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing 
their sins. But when he noticed a number of the 
Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he 
said to them, ‘You brood of vipers, who told you to 
flee from the coming Wrath? Now, produce fruit 
that answers to your repentance, instead of presuming 
to say to yourselves, ““We have a father in Abraham.”’ 
I tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham 
from these stones! The axe is lying all ready at the 
root of the trees; any tree that is not producing good 
fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. 

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he 
who is coming after me is mightier, and I am not 
fit even to carry his sandals; he will baptize you with 
the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fan is in his 
hand, he will clean out his threshing-floor, his wheat 
he will gather into the granary, but the straw he will 
burn with fire unquenchable.’ 

“Then Jesus came on the scene from Galilee, to get 
baptized by John at the Jordan. John tried to prevent 
him; ‘I need to get baptized by you,’ he said, ‘and you 
come to me!’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Come now, 


82 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


this is how we should fulfil all our duty to God.’ 
Then John gave in to him. Now when Jesus had been 
baptized, the moment he rose out of the water, the 
heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God coming 
down like a dove upon him. And a voice from heaven 
said, 


66 ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, 
in him is my delight.’ ” 


How quickly the atmosphere, the setting, of the 
portrait is produced, and how rapid the movement! 
John “came’’; he came “preaching’’; he came into the 
“wilderness” of Judaea, the rocky wastes, with sparse 
shrubbery and undergrowth. His message is given 
in a sentence: “Repent, the Reign of Heaven is near.” 
This is all buttressed with a quotation from the Old 
Testament. 

Now the sketch, clean-cut, not a superfluous word, 
follows; but it stands out as if carved,—the camel’s 
hair raiment, the leathern girdle, the food of locusts 
and wild honey. Then the crowds pouring out to him, 
his magnetic attraction. The defiance of the reigning 
rulers, ‘“Generation of vipers!” The assault on the en- 
tire social structure, the ax at the root of the tree. 
The concrete language he uses, the pictures he draws, 
unloosing shoes, the fan of the threshing floor, wheat 
into bins, fire for chaff. A few paragraphs only, and 
John the Baptist stands before the world, painted since 
by a thousand artists, but always in the way this first 
sketch outlines. 

The fourth gospel, that of St. John, differs from the 


CHARACTER-SKETCH—THE BAPTIST 33 


rest. The writer takes the liberty to make his own 
comment. He shows the influence of Greek reading, 
in his thinking, not only, but also in his manner. A 
few of his sentences will show the freedom of St. 
John’s style: 


“A man appeared, sent by God, whose name was 
John: he came for the purpose of witnessing, to bear 
testimony to the Light, so that all men might believe 
by means of him. He was not the Light; it was to 
bear testimony to the Light that he appeared. The 
real Light, which enlightens every man, was coming 
then into the world: . . . (John testified to him with 
the cry, ‘This was he of whom I said, my successor 
has taken precedence of me, for he preceded me.’) 
For we have all been receiving grace after grace from 
his fulness; while the Law was given through Moses, 
grace and reality are ours through Jesus Christ.” 


The fourth gospel adds a touch of pathos to the 
picture of the Baptist, which the other gospels do not, 
illustrating the Baptist’s word:—“He must wax, I 
must wane.” 


“Next day again John was standing with two of 
his disciples; he gazed at Jesus as he walked about, 
and said, ‘Look, there is the lamb of God!’ The two 
disciples heard what he said and went after Jesus.” 


After the sunset follows the night; and darkness 
settles over the head of the Baptist. In the sad 
dungeon of Machaerus, among the gashed mountains 


34 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


that look down upon the Dead Sea, Herod’s anger 
lodges him. Here for centuries had been the resort 
of ascetics, Ebionites, Essenes, prophets of the wilder- 
ness. Here they lived in caves and dens, dressed in 
skins and hair-cloth. Herod makes a sort of sar- 
castic gesture in this choice of prisons; for this neigh- 
borhood, no doubt, was the original home of the Bap- 
tist. . 

Finally in the banquet-hall, probably at Jericho, the 
City of Palms, a favorite residence of the Herods, the 
jealous king, drunk and maudlin, passes sentence of 
death upon the prophet. Poets, dramatists, painters, 
have long recognized the beauty and the tragic value 
of the story; but their efforts have not improved it, 
or even equaled it. It is the old theme so true to 
human experience of the prophet, the artist, the 
teacher, who dares to tell the truth to his generation, 
paying for it with his life. Matthew, at the opening 
of his fourteenth chapter, heading the story with the 
guilty remorse of Herod, goes back chronologically to 
bring up his narrative: 


“At that time Herod the tetrarch heard about the 
fame of Jesus. And he said to his servants, ‘This is 
John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead. That 
is why miraculous powers are working through him.’ 
For Herod had arrested John and bound him and put 
him in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of his 
brother Philip, since John had told him, “You have no 
right to her.’ He was anxious to kill him but he 
was afraid of the people, for they held John to be a 
prophet. However, on Herod’s birthday, the daughter 


CHARACTER-SKETCH—THE BAPTIST 35 


of Herodias danced in public to the delight of Herod; 
whereupon he promised with an oath to give her what- 
ever she wanted. And she, at the instigation of her 
mother, said, ‘Give me John the Baptist’s head this 
moment on a dish.’ The king was sorry, but for the 
sake of his oath and his guests he ordered it to be 
given her; he sent and had John beheaded in the prison, 
his head was brought on a dish and given to the girl, 
and she took it to her mother. His disciples came and 
removed the corpse and buried him; then they went 
and reported it to Jesus.” 


The daughter of Herodias, traditionally known as 
Salome, has appealed to the dramatic sense of poets 
and artists ever since,—as to Stephen Phillips and 
Oscar Wilde. How many startling pictures have been 
drawn of her; how many varying phases the dark- 
eyed ruthless beauty has presented to the world! She 
and her mother and Herod furnish a sinister back- 
ground for the rugged and devoted figure of the Bap- 
tist. It is a forbidding tale, to be sure, and its charm 
is the charm of Dante’s Inferno; its beauty is the 
beauty of Gustave Doré. There is beauty, however, 
in a thunder storm and in the jagged lightning, just 
as in the tragic catastrophes of Lear and Macbeth and 
John the Baptist. 


Chapter IV 
JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 


The character and the environment of the men Jesus 
chose for his inner circle of followers at the beginning 
of his public career arrest attention. The selection of 
such a cabinet might seem a commonplace procedure; 
but in this instance it is attended both by the grace of 
his own bearing and the atmosphere of hill, valley and 
lake. 

The character of the men he chooses lends charm to 
the story. He seems not at all to consult expediency. 
One would expect him to select some one or two from 
the ruling classes, the scribes and Pharisees, conserva- 
tive pillars of the existing order. One would look some- 
where in the number for a prominent merchant or busi- 
ness man. A soldier there should be, too, a spiritual 
descendant of David, the lion of the tribe of Judah. A 
herdsman, one would expect, would be selected to repre- 
sent a pastoral nation, or a landholder, a sheik of wide 
ranges and patriarchal dignity. 

To our surprise he chooses principally young fisher- 
men, all dwelling about one little lake. Four of them 
are partners. The Master makes no attempt at wide 
distribution or selection from this or that tribe,—he 
takes the friends that are nearest at hand or the 
strangers that happen to appear. It is a picturesque 
procedure, attended with picturesque incidents. One 


man is a publican, surely an inadvertent and unwise 
36 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 37 


choice, a tax-gatherer, hated by the people. Nobody 
likes to pay taxes, particularly to a foreign oppressor. 
Rome farmed out the gathering of taxes to the high- 
est bidding publican. He, in turn, exacted from the 
people no set sum, but the last drop of blood he could 
wring. Why did Jesus choose Matthew, or Levi, as he 
was variously called, to be one of his twelve? Why did 
he choose the traitor Judas? There is no answer. 
Certainly he did not consult expediency. Every step in 
the selection of the cabinet is unexpected and daring. 


CALLING FISHERMEN 


Renan calls Jesus “The Charming Rabbi.” The 
words Jesus uses in summoning his followers evince 
something of this charm. He sees four men fishing, 
and he says: “Follow me, I will make you fish for men,” 
—an appeal to their business. He does not explain, out- 
line their duties, forecast their rewards. He utters 
what is, after all, his great message to all the world, 
“Follow me!” Forsaking all, they follow. 

The Lake of Galilee, blue as the sky, lies six hundred 
feet below the level of the Mediterranean which is only 
some thirty miles away. Fed by the Jordan, which 
rises to the north from the “dews of Hermon,” it drains 
into that same river, which goes tumbling through 
chasms and gorges, until, across the plains of Jericho it 
crawls into the salt pit of the Dead Sea. The Lake, 
surrounded by the hills of Galilee—blue Galilee— 
changes in an hour from calm to tempest. To this day 
the capricious little sea presents just about the same 
appearance that it did two thousand years ago, dotted 


88 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


with fishing boats, lateen-rigged, their sails red and 
brown, with fishers’ mud-huts clustered at intervals 
along its margin. 

One day we left Tiberias under a cloudless sky and 
sailed to Bethsaida, the home of Peter and Andrew, 
when, after luncheon on the grass, and an hour among 
the fallen columns of Capharnahum, we started the 
return journey with-a fair wind. Almost within sight 
of Tiberias a storm swooped down from the hills, and, 
furling our sails, we took to the oars and only with 
great difficulty made the shore. In half an hour the 
sun shone clear again. 

The lake, shaped like a pear, with the heavy end 
toward the north, and the stem represented by the 
Jordan flowing out at the south, measures thirteen 
miles in length and six miles in width at the widest 
part. Fish abound in it, now as then, and feed the 
country-side. The same types of rugged personality 
appear in the boatmen and fishermen now, no doubt, as 
frequented these shores in the time of Jesus. From 
such men as these Jesus selected the cabinet for his 
world-shaping realm, 

The fourth chapter of Matthew contains the narra- 
tive: 


“As he was walking along the sea of Galilee he saw 
two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and his 
brother Andrew, casting a net in the sea—for they 
were fishermen; so he said to them, ‘Come, follow me, 
and I will make you fish for men.’ And they dropped 
their nets at once and followed him. Then going on 
from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 39 


Zebedaeus and his brother John, mending their nets in 
the boat beside their father Zebedaeus. He called them, 
and they left the boat and their father at once, and went 
after him.” 


In two instances, the man called to be an apostle 
first hurries away to find his brother and summons him 
to share in the honor and privilege; thus in both cases 
these men reveal something of their own character. 
These two men have given their names to one of the 
great fraternities whose purpose is the finding of 
fellow-men—the Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip. 

First Andrew calls his brother Simon, his greater 
brother. He must have known that Simon would out- 
shine him. Andrew lived in Simon Peter’s house with 
Peter’s wife and her mother. Probably then Andrew 
was unmarried himself; and the Hebrews regarded it 
as a great misfortune if a man reached maturity with- 
out wife, children, and a home of his own. Then, they 
said, “He had not where to lay his head.”” One cannot 
but speculate about the economic necessity, or the care 
of aged parents, or the various other obstacles, which 
prevented Andrew from forming domestic ties ; and one 
cannot but feel that here is a self-sacrifice on the part 
of Andrew in order that his more restless, ambitious, 
and determined brother, Simon, might have the oppor- 
tunities of life. Andrew, therefore, though possibly 
the older, from this time forth takes second place. 
Simon Peter becomes the natural leader of the twelve, 
the secretary of state for the cabinet. 

No character in the New Testament stands out more 
clearly from the pages than Simon Peter—the rock 


40 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


apostle. We shall see him from time to time as plainly 
as if he were painted, and more alive than any portrait. 
He plunges into the sea, trying to walk to Jesus on 
the water; on another occasion he cannot wait for the 
boat in which he is, to reach the shore where Jesus 
stands, but leaps into the water to swim ashore. He 
draws a sword and strikes in the garden of Geth- 
semane, and the same night denies, with oaths, that he 
knows Jesus. On the mount of transfiguration, he 
wants to pitch tents and stay forever. Daring, mer- 
curial, quixotic, self-assertive, he could not help but 
lead. Yet he has the defects of his qualities; and even 
in later years, when his character becomes so much 
calmer and more reliable, he never entirely overcomes 
his limitations. St. Paul contends with him and “with- 
stands him to the face, for he was to be blamed.” 

Even in old age, according to the tradition, he could 
not always keep firm; for when persecution arose at 
Rome, Peter fled from the city. As he hurried out the 
Appian Way, the apparition of Jesus met him in the 
road. Simon Peter tremblingly enquired: 

“Quo vadis, Domim?’—“‘Whither goest thou, 
Lord?” 

“Back into the city to die again with my people!” 
answered the Master. 

Then Peter turned about, went into Rome, was 
taken and condemned to crucifixion. As they nailed 
him to the cross, Simon begged that he be crucified 
head downward, since he considered himself unworthy 
to die as his Lord had died. And it was done. This 
old legend, whether authentic or fanciful, is none the 
less true to the character of Simon. 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 41 


On one occasion Jesus told Simon that Satan desired 
to have him that he might sift him as wheat. From this 
phrase an old folk-song has found its way into our 
language through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 


“In Saint Luke’s Gospel we are told 
How Peter in the days of old 
Was sifted; 
And now, though ages intervene, 
Sin is the same, while time and scene 
Are shifted. 


“For all at last the cock will crow 
Who hear the warning voice, but go 
Unheeding, 
Till thrice and more they have denied 
The Man of Sorrows, crucified 
And bleeding. 


“But noble souls, through dust and heat, 
Rise from disaster and defeat 
The stronger, 
And conscious still of the divine 
Within them, lie on earth supine 
No longer.” 


Philip, who also lived in Bethsaida, the home of 
Andrew and Peter, seeks out his brother Nathanael, 
and tells him he has found the Messiah, the long ex- 
pected one who was to come and save broken and scat- 
tered Israel, in the person of a man, Jesus, from 
Nazaret. ‘“‘Nazaret!’ exclaims Nathanael, and won- 


42 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


deringly enquires, in the words of a proverb, “Can any 
good thing come out of Nazaret?’ “Come and see,” 
replies Philip. 

As Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, He remarked: 
“Here is a genuine Israelite! There is no guile in 
him.” 

“How do you know me?” exclaimed Nathanael. 

“When you were under that fig-tree, before ever 
Philip called you, I saw you,” responded Jesus. 

What convinced Nathanael, in these words of the 
Nazarene, we can only guess. What was Nathanael 
doing under that fig-tree? Praying? Meditating? 
Whatever it was, it was enough, and Nathanael cried 
out: 

“Rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the King of 
Israel!” 

In this little incident two more brothers among the 
twelve stand clearly limned before our eyes. 

Ray Palmer, in a poem on the text, “When you were 
under that fig-tree, I saw you,” pictures Nathanael 


praying: 


“T saw thee when, as twilight fell, 
And evening lit her fairest star, 
Thy footsteps sought yon quiet dell, 
The world’s confusion left afar. 


“T saw thee from that sacred spot 
With firm and peaceful soul depart; 
I, Jesus, saw thee,—doubt it not,— 
And read the secrets of thy heart!” 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 43 


Another pair of brothers, James and John, sons of 
Zebedaefis, fishermen of Galilee, we know well. They 
were strong, brawny-armed, brave, dashing young men, 
who had earned the name, “Sons of Thunder.” Their 
mother thought them equal to the two chief places in 
the restored kingdom, one on each side of the king; and 
they shared her opinion. One of these brothers, John, 
Jesus loved above all his followers. He it was who 
understood Jesus soonest and best. He leaned on the 
Master’s breast at the last supper. His name is attached 
to the fourth gospel, though probably it was composed 
too late to have been written even in his advanced age. 
He is by some supposed to have written the book called 
“Revelation.” 

He is the only one of the apostles who did not die 
a violent death; and tradition goes that in his later life 
he was bishop of Ephesus and the surrounding cities of | 
Asia Minor. It is said that when ninety years old, or 
thereabouts, his hair and beard white as snow, and 
when he was too feeble to walk, young men would bear 
him in an arm-chair into the church-assembly, and, 
stretching forth his palsied hands in blessing, the aged 
apostle would falter always the same words: 

“Little children, love one another !”’ 

Whether this story is true or not, it is in keeping 
with what we know of John. 

The other Son of Thunder, James, is, as one might 
expect, the first martyr. He died in Jerusalem in the 
early days of the church. Herod slew him with the 
sword. 

Only three others of the twelve, making nine in all, 


44 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


are clear in our minds. Matthew Levi is one of these, 
the tax-gatherer, who immediately upon being chosen 
made a great feast in his house for Jesus. Important 
men in Capharnahum accepted his invitation—Phari- 
sees and scribes; so in spite of the fact that he was a 
hated tax-gatherer he stood high in the community so 
far as mere prestige was concerned. He was the first 
to write down the_words of Christ into a document 
which lies at the base of the gospel called Matthew’s 
gospel. That document of the speeches of Jesus, 
known as “The Logia of Matthew,’ may have been 
made from memory, or it may even have been written 
from shorthand notes. Matthew Levi, therefore, pos- 
sessed a degree of culture and a certain amount of 
initiative. 

Judas Iscariot, the betrayer, the traitor, stands out 
clearly in the picture, a materialist, a money-grabber, 
ruthless and unscrupulous. All attempts to excuse his 
action by urging that he merely desired to drive Jesus, 
in spite of himself, to take up arms and assume the 
government, only defeat themselves. He is the forbid- 
ding figure in the group—the fly in the amber oint- 
ment. 

One other remains, Thomas, the skeptic, the doubter, 
who did not and could not understand Jesus, but who, 
on one occasion in Peroea, when it seemed as if the 
Master was marching to certain death, said, “Come, let 
us go with him, that we may die with him.” Phleg- 
matic, slow in mental processes, unable to believe until 
he had put his fingers into the nail-prints and his hand 
into the spear-wound, Thomas nevertheless knew how 
to love and in the end to die for that love. Doubtless 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS 45 


it could be said of Thomas, as Tennyson said of his 
dear friend, Arthur Hallam: 


“He fought his doubts, and gathered strength, 
Fe would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the specters of the mind 

And laid them; thus he came at length, 


“To find a stronger faith his own, 
And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone.”’ 


Nine of the twelve, then, the New Testament 
sketches for us in outlines that render their figures 
familiar for all time. Three others it is content to 
leave more or less dim and shadowy. Would any other 
documents, nearly so brief, have done so well? 

The list of the twelve apostles, the cabinet of the 
Master, may not mean a great deal to the modern 
mind, unless one has become familiar with their per- 
sonalities; but having learned to know these men, 
the roll becomes a source of deep interest (Matthew 
X:2-4). 


“These are the names of the twelve apostles: first 
Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, 
James the son of Zebedaeus and John his brother, 
Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax- 
gatherer, James the son of Alphaeus and Lebbaeus 
whose surname is Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot and 
Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.” 


46 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


In the choosing of the twelve Jesus reveals himself. 
He shows himself human in the best sense of that 
word. Friendship plays a large part in his selection; 
for he was acquainted with these fishermen. Two of 
them, Andrew and John, knew him before, as the narra- 
tive makes fairly clear when the Baptist pointed him 
out to them, and they followed him. They, in turn, in- 
troduced him to their brothers. We know, too, that 
he frequented the neighborhood of Bethsaida and Ca- 
pharnahum, where these fishermen worked. Friend- 
ship, not expediency, seemed to weigh with him. 

His democracy is equally evident in the choice. He 
sought no man because of his station. He chose men 
for what they were, not for what they had or for 
what other men thought of them. The courage of his 
choosing is evident. There is clearly no purpose of 
conciliation toward the influential elements of society. 
He disregards haughty public opinion and makes his 
intimates of those whom the powerful would scorn. 

His wisdom, too, is amply justified, as the centuries 
have shown, He was not unwise even in the selection 
of the betrayer, Judas, and the denier, Simon. Such 
men were necessary in working out his purpose. As 
for ten of these men, their martyrdom reveals that he 
could not have secured greater souls among the high 
and mighty of the earth. Moreover, his sympathy is 
apparent, his fellow feeling with all sorts and condi- 
tions of men. 

They are an unexpected company, these apostles, not 
men of “light and leading” according to the standards 
of their day. Most of them are men of the out-of- 
doors, handworkers, Galileans far from the seat of 


JESUS CHOOSES HIS FRIENDS AT 


government. Rustics, bearded, muscled,—they excited 
the derision and contempt of the rulers. All these men 
proved great souls except one; and he, a traitor. All 
the rest died martyrs to the cause but one, John the 
evangelist, who lived to advanced age. Some of them 
developed into great preachers, missionaries, religious 
statesmen; and all have places in history. They left 
old battered boats, patched and mended nets, for—im- 
mortality. 


Chapter V 
THE POETRY OF JESUS 


Jesus is not so much the poet, to us, as the saint, 
the prophet, the trenchant moral teacher. So absorbed 
are we in his message that we lose sight of the garb 
in which it is clad. The sheer beauty escapes our at- 
tention. None the less, a prophet, a saint, must also be 
a poet. The prophets of Israel were poets with a keen 
sense of the romantic in human life, an appreciation of 
the musical in nature. The same sense of the har- 
monies rings in the speech of Christ. 

Music sounds in his words, and a sense of music 
throbs in the least expected moments in his speech. To 
some, words are notes; to others they are mere counters, 
like beads on a string. One cannot acquire much of 
the feeling for music in words; it is born or not born in 
us. Two people may speak the same thought; and one 
will make it chime, while the other will merely utter it. 
There is no analyzing the difference. Rhyme and 
meter are not essential; for prose may ring and sing 
as well as metrical forms of composition. John Ruskin 
could make prose musical; so could Robert Louis 
Stevenson; most of Walt Whitman is truly musical 
prose. Thus Victor Hugo sings in his address on Vol- 
taire and alludes to the power of well-chosen and 
chiming words when he refers to Voltaire’s own gift 
in the expression: “That which has the lightness of 


the wind and the power of the thunderbolt—a pen.” 
48 


THE POETRY OF JESUS 49 


The sense of music in Jesus’ words survives, in 
translation, from one language to another. Musical in 
the Greek in which his words live, musical in the 
Aramaic in which no doubt they were first spoken, they 
are musical still in English or any other language into 
which they may have been translated. 

Listen to the plaintive strain in this, the favorite 
passage, perhaps, and the most comforting in the whole 
Bible, to the largest number of men and women (Mat- 
thew XI: 28-30): 


““Come to me, all who are labouring and burdened, 
and I will refresh you. 

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I 
am gentle and humble in heart, and you will 
find your souls refreshed; my yoke is kindly 
and my burden light.’ ” 


He calls upon us here not to take a burden upon our 
necks, but to share our burdens with him by putting our 
heads into his yoke that he may help us to bear. He 
does not take away our burdens, to be sure; he even 
adds burdens; but he helps us to bear them. The very 
words are as sweet as the notes of a wood-wind in- 
strument. 

Another reassuring passage is John fourteen, in 
which Jesus teaches that loved ones “fallen asleep” are 
not lost to us: 


“Tet not your hearts be disquieted; you believe— 
believe in God and also in me. In my Father’s house 
there are many abodes; were it not so, would I have 


50 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


told you I was going to prepare a place for you? And 
when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
back and take you to be with me, so that you may be 
where I am. And you know the way to where I am 
going.’ ‘Lord,’ said Thomas, ‘we do not know where 
you are going, and how are we to know the way?’ 
Jesus said to him, ‘I am the real and living way: no one 
comes to the Father except by means of me. If you 
knew me, you would know my Father, too. You know 
him now and you have seen him.’ ” 


In addition to this general sense of harmony, our 
Master possesses and employs also the technique of the 
poet. His words often fall into the parallelism of 
Hebrew poetry, the contrasts and antitheses. For their 
content, his deliverances must have startled his hear- 
ers; and for their manner, charmed those who listened. 
There are the beatitudes, the beginning of the Sermon 
on the Mount, in Matthew five: 


“So when he saw the crowds, he went up the hill 
and sat down; his disciples came up to him and he 
opened his lips and began to teach them. He said: 


“Blessed are those who feel poor in spirit! 

the Realm of heaven is theirs. 

Blessed are the mourners! 
they will be consoled. 

Blessed are the humble! 
they will inherit the earth. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for good- 

ness ! 

they will be satisfied. 


See i ee 


THE POETRY OF JESUS 51 


Blessed are the merciful! 
they will find mercy. 
Blessed are the pure in heart! 
they will see God. 
Blessed are the peacemakers! 
they will be ranked sons of God. 

Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the 

sake of goodness! 
the Realm of heaven is theirs, 

Blessed are you when men denounce you and perse- 
cute you and utter all manner of evil against you 
for my sake; rejoice and exult in it, for your 
reward is rich in heaven; that is how they per- 
secuted the prophets before you.’ ” 


There appear in these verses the favorite forms of 
expression of Hebrew poets; and those who listened to 
him were well aware that they were hearing, not merely 
moral precepts of originality, but also poetry, chaste 
and delicate. 

The love of nature and the appreciation of it appears 
in Jesus’ words. He constantly turns to the natural 
beauty about him for his illustrations, renders his speech 
vibrant with color, rugged with rock or storm, accord- 
ing to his purpose. His daintiest and most pointed 
allusions no doubt came to him on the moment, caught 
on the wing, from what he saw immediately round 
him. He sees and at once uses the sower sowing his 
seed, the lilies flowering in the valley, the mustard plant 
with birds in its branches, the fish glinting through 
the waves of the sea. 

It is difficult to find in human language words more 


52 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


beautiful than his appeal to the lilies in the Sermon on 
the Mount. No doubt these flowers lay spread at his 
feet, carpeting the valley, even as they may be seen 
in the spring of the year to-day on the plains of 
Esdraelon and of Sharon. Every traveler in Palestine 
remembers the flowers which in the spring run riot 
over the plains, valleys, water’s edge and hillsides. 
There are no poppies like the poppies of the Near East. 


“In Flanders fields the poppies grow 
Between the crosses, row on row.” 


In Palestine, however, they grow everywhere, ten for 
every one in Flanders fields. Round the Lake of 
Galilee and bordering the Jordan, the oleanders bloom 
in a profusion not known in our western world. And 
the orange-blossom perfume that wafts over the waves 
at Joppa—who that has inhaled it can ever forget it? 
The anemone and the acacia, the wistaria and the 
bougainvillaea of the Mediterranean countries, beside a 
thousand species of small and shrinking flowers that 
hide beneath the grasses of the Holy Land, these all 
attest the genial skies of the Near East. Jesus seems 
aware of the presence of these flowers; and no doubt 
he had them in mind and perhaps just under his eye 
when he spoke the gentle words in the Sermon on the 
Mount (Matthew VI: 28-34): 


“ “And why should you trouble over clothing? 
Look how the lilies of the field grow; 
they neither toil nor spin, 
and yet, I tell you, even Solomon in all his 
grandeur was never robed like one of them. 


THE POETRY OF JESUS 53 


Now if God so clothes the grass of the field which 
blooms to-day and is thrown to-morrow into 
the furnace, will not he much more clothe you? 
O men, how little you trust him! Do not be 
troubled, then, and cry, “What are we to eat?” 
or “what are we to drink?” or “how are we to be 
clothed?” (pagans make all that their aim in 
life) for your heavenly Father knows quite well 
you need all that. Seek God’s Realm and his 
goodness, and all that will be yours over and 
above. 

So do not be troubled about to-morrow; 

to-morrow will take care of itself. 
The day’s own trouble is quite enough for the day.’ ” 


The conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount has so 
impressed itself upon human remembrance as to have 
passed into a proverb. To “build one’s house upon the 
sand” is now a household word, two thousand years 
after the figure was devised. 


“ ‘Now, every one who listens to these words of mine 
and acts upon them will be like a sensible man 
who built his house on rock. The rain came 
down, the floods rose, the winds blew and beat 
upon that house, but it did not fall, for it was 
founded on rock. And every one who listens 
to these words of mine and does not act upon 
them will be like a stupid man who built his 
house on sand. The rain came down, the 
floods rose, the winds blew and beat upon that 
house, and down it fell—with a mighty crash.’ 


54 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“When Jesus finished his speech, the crowds were 
astounded at his teaching; for he taught them 
like an authority, not like their own scribes.” 


The intimacy of spirit between the Master and his 
disciples, as well as the tie existing among all his fol- 
lowers, is set forth in a comparison taken from one of 
the commonest sights which his hearers beheld daily. 
The Story of the Vine and the Branches has entwined 
itself, as John records it, in the beginning of his fif- 
teenth chapter, in the hearts of all readers of the New 
Testament: 


““T am the real Vine, and my Father is the vine- 
dresser ; he cuts away any branch on me which is 
not bearing fruit, and cleans every branch which 
does bear fruit, to make it bear richer fruit. 
You are already clean, by the word I have 
spoken to you. Remain in me, as I remain in 
you; just as a branch cannot bear fruit by it- 
self, without remaining on the vine, neither 
can you, unless you remain in me. I am the 
vine, you are the branches. He who remains 
in me, as I in him, bears rich fruit (because 
apart from me you can do nothing). If any 
one does not remain in me he is thrown aside 
like a branch and he withers up; then the 
branches are gathered and thrown into the fire 
to be burned. If you remain in me and my 
words remain in you, then ask whatever you 
like and you shall have it. As you bear rich 
fruit and prove yourselves my disciples, my 
Father is glorified.’ ” 


THE POETRY OF JESUS 55 


“To glorify God and enjoy Him forever,’ which 
has been considered the chief end of man, is here de- 
clared by our Master to be entirely possible and even 
necessary. 

In the ninth chapter of Mark, he uses that form of 
cadence we call the refrain—a recurring expression, 
like an echo. 


“Tf your hand is a hindrance to you, cut it off: 
better be maimed and get into Life, 
than keep your two hands and go to Gehenna, to 
the fire that is never quenched. 
If your foot is a hindrance to you, cut it off: 
better get into Life a cripple, 
than keep your two feet and be thrown into 
Gehenna. 
If your eye is a hindrance to you, tear it out: 
better to get into God’s Realm with one eye, 
than keep your two eyes and be thrown into 
Gehenna, 
where their worm never dies and the fire is never 
put out.’ ” 


Among the poems of the Master must be cited the 
two prayers he has left behind in written form. First 
there is that for his disciples in the seventeenth of John, 
where he prays among other things: 


“ “May they all be one! As thou, Father, art in 
me and I in thee, so may they be in us—that the 
world may believe thou hast sent me.’ ”’ 


56 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Next there is that dainty, delicate, and yet strong bit 
of devotional literature which we call “The Lord’s 
Prayer,’ found in the Sermon on the Mount in Mat- 
thew six: 


“Our Father in heaven, 
thy name be revered, 
thy Reign begin, 
thy will be done 
on earth as in heaven! 
give us to-day our bread for the morrow, 
and forgive us our debts 
as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors, 
and lead us not into temptation 
but deliver us from evil.’ ”’ 


Who taught Jesus poetry? It must have been born 
in him, handed down from that far ancestor who was 
in his day the Sweet Singer of Israel. He must have 
steeped himself in it as he listened to the reading from 
the sacred rolls of the Scriptures in the synagogue, or as 
he stood brooding on the cliffs near his home looking 
away across the Plain of Esdraelon at his feet to misty 
Carmel, Tabor, or the hills of Samaria. Born with 
a love of musical words, doubtless he intensified it by 
playing on the chords of memory and practicing, per- 
haps all unconsciously, in the solitude of his own soul, 
this greatest of all the arts. 


Chapter VI 
SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 


People never get so old or so sophisticated that they 
cannot profit by an apt story skillfully told. Some 
of the greatest minds have found the anecdote, the 
short story, the parable, convenient for enforcing and 
illuminating truth. They have deliberately used it to 
stimulate flagging interest or to ease too great tension. 
Abraham Lincoln, in our own country, showed himself 
a master in its argumentative use; Aesop, in Ancient 
Greece; Dean Swift and John Bunyan, in the British 
Isles. 

The Hebrews did not seem greatly given to the 
anecdote, or parable. Their scriptures contain few of 
them; so that Jesus in the use of the story runs a new 
road of his own. There is in the Old Testament, in 
Judges nine, but one story, brief, and designed to con- 
vey a moral lesson, which almost challenges comparison 
with the parables of Christ. The trees choose the 
bramble to reign over them, because the fig, the vine, 
and the olive refuse the honor. It still applies in pol- 
itics. 

It is no easy task to compose short stories; the 
shorter the tale, the greater the skill required. In all 
times the story-teller has been in great request; and 
much of the world’s best literature came first into 
being in the form of narratives told or sung by camp- 


fires, in castle-halls, or round cottage-hearths by stroll- 
57 


58 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


ing minstrels or by wise old seers. Even in these 
modern days successful raconteurs attract large hear- 
ings. 

A young teacher may run too much to anecdote and 
illustration; an old one, too much to abstract truth. 
A just balance between these two extremes is not easy 
to maintain. Jesus places before the people profound 
and abstract thought; but he never fails to illuminate 
it and make it glow by means of concrete imagery and 
anecdote. 

He selects his topics from the life he sees about 
him, and does not go afield into strange places for 
them. He looks upon the farms and pasture lands, 
into the homes and hearts of the people, and draws 
his material from these convincing sources. What we 
call “human interest’’ throbs in all his discourse, espe- 
cially in his parables. He loves nature and adorns his 
talk with the white of the lily, the crimson of the 
poppy, the rainbow of the pearl, the silver reflection 
of the fish darting through translucent waters. In 
this regard, he stands in marked contrast to St. Paul, 
who seems never to see these beauties of nature, but 
illustrates only from markets, games, military life, 
and the crowded cities of men. 

Confronting the mass of faces, some eager, some 
stolid, some sneering and hostile, some sober and 
thoughtful, Jesus casts about for a figure or a story 
by which to illustrate the responsibility of the hearer. 
He wishes to show that all the burden in moral crises 
does not rest upon him, the teacher; but much rests 
upon them, the listeners. He wants to drive home to 
their hearts that they must take heed how they hear. 


a 


i Se ee ee 


SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 59 


Seeing a farmer at work, therefore, upon a neighbor- 
ing hill, he points to him, broadcasting his grain upon 
the prepared land. Fancy how vivid and concrete must 
have been the impression upon eyes and minds before 
him. (Matthew XIII: 3-9.) 


THE STORY OF THE SOWER 


“He spoke at some length to them in parables, say- 
ing: ‘A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed some 
seeds fell on the road and the birds came and ate them 
up. Some other seeds fell on stony soil where they had 
not much earth, and shot up at once because they had 
no depth of soil; but when the sun rose they got 
scorched and withered away because they had no root. 
Some other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns 
sprang up and choked them. Some other seeds fell 
on good soil and bore a crop, some a hundredfold, 
some sixty, and some thirtyfold. He who has an ear, 
let him listen to this.’ ” 


In explaining the story he declares that part of his 
purpose in using the parable is to sift out the discern- 
ing, the quick-witted, the open-hearted, from the slow, 
indifferent and even hostile hearers. He wants his 
message to reach those ready to hear and accept it, 
and to miss those who would reject it. 

The great message of Jesus may be comprehended 
under the one head, The Kingdom of God, or better 
the Realm of God. He strives, therefore, by picture 
and story, to carry to the imaginations of the people 
some clear conception of that elusive idea, that “‘be- 


60 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


loved community,” that unity of all mankind. The 
striving, however, is not evident. The art, because fine, 
seems easy. Story after story he tells to show the 
inestimable value of the Realm of God. That Realm 
is the most precious possession. Once to accept it and 
to obtain from it a peace that is more valuable than 
anything else in the world is to find a solution of the 
perplexed problem of life. Jesus therefore compares 
it to buried treasure, always fascinating to those who 
hear of it, and to a pearl of the greatest price. 


““The Realm of heaven is like treasure hidden in a 
field; the man who finds it hides it and in his delight 
goes and sells all he possesses and buys that field. 

““Again, the Realm of heaven is like a trader in 
search of fine pearls; when he finds a single pearl of 
high price, he is off to sell ail he possesses and 
buy it.’ ” 


If one loses this invaluable possession, peace of 
mind, ease of conscience, goes with it. Life is upset. 
It is as if one had lost the dearest thing one had; and 
Jesus brings home to his hearers the utter helplessness 
that one feels who had lost such a loved article. The 
coins of dowry, which women of the East wear, gold 
or silver, about their foreheads, mean much more to 
them than so much legal tender. They mean home, 
love, children, the assured status of a woman who 
has found her destiny in the world. To lose one is a 
calamity beside which the modern western woman’s 
loss of all her diamonds would be but trivial. (Luke 
POV eas) 


SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 61 


““Or again, suppose a woman has ten shillings. 
If she loses one of them, does she not light a lamp 
and scour the house and search carefully till she find 
it? And when she finds it she gathers her women 
friends and neighbours, saying, “Rejoice with me for 
I have found the shilling I lost.’’ So, I tell you there 
is joy in the presence of the angels of God over a 
single sinner who repents.’ ”’ 


In what a delicate way in the last sentence the Master 
refers to God. He does not say joy among the angels, 
but in the presence of the angels; and who is in the 
presence of the angels but God? 

For the men as well as the women who listened to 
him, Jesus had a story just as incisive. Many of these 
men were shepherds; and even the others had inti- 
mately to do with shepherds and their flocks. The 
parable of the shepherd and his lost sheep is a com- 
panion piece to the Lost Coin, and is especially appo- 
site, in view of the fact that the rulers and the ultra- 
respectables of society declared themselves greatly 
shocked that Jesus had so much to do with tax- 
gatherers and outcasts. There is irony in the conclud- 
ing sentence. (Luke XV: 4-7.) 


“Which of you with a hundred sheep, if he loses 
one, does not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and 
go after the lost one till he finds it? When he finds 
it he puts it on his shoulders with joy, and when he 
gets home he gathers his friends and neighbours: “Re- 
joice with me,” he says to them, “for I have found 
the sheep I lost.;’'....So, Titell) you, there is joy in 


62 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


the presence of the angels of God over a single sinner 
who repents.’ ”’ 


Jesus sometimes speaks words or tells stories that 
have a smile in them. ‘The perversity of humanity 
must, at times, sorely have tried his patience; but in- 
stead of showing irritation, he half-laughingly reduces 
the obstinacy of men to an absurdity, as in his illus- 
tration of the children in the marketplace. Humanity, 
slow to take new views, at times stubbornly balks. It 
will do neither one thing nor another. 


“““To what then shall I compare the men of this gen- 
eration? 
What are they like? 
Like children sitting in the marketplace and calling 
to one ancther, 
“We piped to you and you would not dance, 
we lamented and you would not weep.” 
For John the Baptist has come, eating no bread and 
drinking no wine, 
and you say, “He has a devil’; 
the Son of man has come eating and drinking, 
and you say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, 
a friend of taxgatherers and sinners!” 
Nevertheless, Wisdom is vindicated by all her chil- 
dren 4 


These stubborn fellows would play neither funeral 
nor wedding. They refused to play at all, but only 
sulked., 

A very clear and plain instance of humor is found 


SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 63 


in his short story concerning the excuses men made 
for not doing their duty by the Realm of God. When 
the king made a marriage supper and invited guests, 
one made excuse that he had bought a piece of ground 
and must go and see it; another said he had purchased 
oxen and must go try them; another, that he had mar- 
ried a wife and could not come. 

Hlow good a business man is one who buys ground 
and then goes to look at it? How sensible is the man 
who buys oxen and then goes to test, or try, them? 
The third excuse is the lamest of all; for what place 
SO appropriate to take a bride as to a wedding-feast? 
Evidently, these are all laughable subterfuges; and we 
may be very sure that Jesus’ hearers enjoyed with him 
the humor of it all. 


THE GOOD SAMARITAN 


The same discernment of motive in human nature 
is found in the story of the Good Samaritan. Those 
who pass by on the other side, refusing to help the 
wounded man, do so not out of sheer cruelty and in- 
difference, but through fear or through anxiety. The 
priest is hurrying, no doubt, to Jerusalem, with the 
purpose of offering sacrifices, and does not wish to 
soil hands or clothing with blood, which would render 
him ceremonially unclean and so prevent his entrance 
to the temple. One should read this story remember- 
ing also that if there was anybody a Samaritan hated 
with all his soul, it was a Jew; and if there was any- 
body a Jew loathed from the bottom of his heart, it 
was a Samaritan. 


64 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


The noblest view from Jerusalem is the plunging 
prospect from the Eastern walls or from the shoulder 
of the Mount of Olives down the rocky gorges to the 
blue waters of the Dead Sea. It seems but a half- 
hour’s walk to that salt lake, blue as indigo, the bluest 
blue ever reflected on the human retina; and one would 
think he could step down there for a plunge and back 
again for breakfast; but it is thirty miles away. The 
road to Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley, steep and 
rocky, in Jesus’ day and even down to the British 
régime, has ever been infested with robbers. Half- 
way down, on a bit of a plateau that widens out from 
the cafions, is the Good Samaritan inn, where all trav- 
elers pause for refreshment—doubtless the very site 
of the inn that Jesus made forever famous, and where 
doubtless he, too, had paused many times in his toil- 
some journeys. (Luke X: 30-36.) 


““A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho 
fell among robbers who stripped and belaboured him 
and then went off leaving him half-dead. Now it so 
chanced that a priest was going down the same road, 
but on seeing him he went past on the opposite side. 
So did a Levite who came to the spot; he looked at 
him but passed on the opposite side. However a 
Samaritan traveller came to where he was and felt 
pity when he saw him; he went to him, bound his 
wounds up, pouring oil and wine into them, mounted 
him on his own steed, took him to an inn, and attended 
to him. Next morning he took out a couple of shillings 
and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Attend to 
him, and if you are put to any extra expense I will 


SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 65 


refund you on my way back.” Which of these three 
men in your opinion, proved a neighbour to the man 
who fell among the robbers?’”’ 


THE LIGHT THAT FAILED 


No daintier story is told by Jesus, no more thor- 
oughly oriental a tale, than one which we might call, 
“The Light That Failed,” better known as the “Para- 
ble of the Ten Virgins.” The jingle of bracelets and 
anklets, the shimmer of silken garments and veils, 
the henna of dyed finger-nails and eyelids, the crash 
and beat of oriental music, all fill the atmosphere of 
this classic story. 

The leisurely East makes much of festivals of all 
kinds—weddings and funerals. We saw little chil- 
dren at Cana, in Galilee, playing funeral in the narrow 
streets where Jesus had attended the marriage feast. 
A wedding takes days to celebrate, with many pres- 
ents, torches and lamps at night; and everybody in the 
community takes a part. 

The coming of the bridal couple to their future 
home, where the wedding-feast occurs, is always a 
surprise. Nobody knows beforehand whether it will 
be by day or by night. Those who wish to partake 
of the feast go out to meet the happy pair, and must 
be on the watch and prepared, whether in the daylight 
or in the darkness. 

The five sensible maids of honor and the five stupid 
ones, in the story of Jesus, the former ready and the 
latter unprepared, face together the surprise moment, 
and for the stupid ones the light fails: 


66 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“Then all the maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. 
The stupid said to the sensible, ‘Give us some of your 
oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the sensible 
replied, ‘No, there may not be enough for us and for 
you. Better go to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ 
Now while they were away buying oil, the bridegroom 
arrived; those maidens who were ready accompanied 
him to the marriage-banquet, and the door was shut. 
Afterwards the rest of the maidens came and said, 
‘Oh sir, oh sir, open the door for us!’ but he replied, 
‘T tell you frankly, I do not know you.’ Keep on the 
watch then, for you know neither the day nor the 
hour.” 


This story is the foundation for Tennyson’s plain- 
tive lines, sung by the little novice to Queen Guinevere: 


“Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill! 
Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. 
Too late, too late! Ye cannot enter now. 


“No light had we: for that we do repent; 
And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. 
Too late, too late! Ye cannot enter now. 


“No light; so late! and dark and chill the night! 
O, let us in, that we may find the light! 
Too late, too late! Ye cannot enter now. 


“Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? 
O, let us in, though late, to kiss his feet! 
No, no, too late! Ye cannot enter now.” 


SHORT STORIES OF JESUS 67 


THE LOST SON 


What shall be said of the story of the Lost, or 
Prodigal, Son? How shall we approach it—the most 
universally true story ever told? Universality of ap- 
peal is the test of great art. This story is found in 
Luke fifteen: 


“He also said: “There was a man who had two 
sons, and the younger said to his father, “Father, give 
me the share of the property that falls to me.” So 
he divided his means among them. Not many days 
later, the younger son sold off everything and went 
abroad to a distant land, where he squandered his 
means in loose living. After he had spent his all, a 
severe famine set in throughout that land, and he be- 
gan to feel in want; so he went and attached himself 
to a citizen of that land, who sent him to his fields 
to feed swine. And he was fain to fill his belly with 
the pods the swine were eating; no one gave him any- 
thing. But when he came to his senses he said, “How 
many hired men of my father have more than enough 
to eat, and here am I perishing of hunger! I will 
be up and off to my father, and I will say to him, 
‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 
I don’t deserve to be called your son any more; only 
make me like one of your hired men.’”’ So he got 
up and went off to his father. But when he was still 
far away his father saw him and felt pity for him 
and ran to fall upon his neck and kiss him. The 
son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven 
and before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son 


68 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


any more.” But the father said to his servants, 
“Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him, give 
him a ring for his hand and sandals for his feet, and 
bring the fatted calf, kill it, and let us eat and be 
merry; for my son here was dead and he has come 
to life, he was lost and he is found.” So they began 
to make merry. Now his elder son was out in the 
field, and as he came near the house he heard music 
and dancing; so, summoning one of the servants, he 
asked what this meant. The servant told him, “Your 
brother has arrived, and your father has killed the 
fatted calf because he has got him back safe and 
sound.” This angered him, and he would not go in. 
His father came out and tried to appease him, but 
he replied, “Look at all the years I have been serving 
you! J have never neglected any of your orders, and 
yet you have never given me so much as a kid, to let 
me make merry with my friends. But as soon as this 
son of yours arrives, after having wasted your means 
with harlots, you kill the fatted calf for him!’ The 
father said to him, “My son, you and I are always 
together, all I have is yours. We could not but make 
merry and rejoice, for your brother here was dead 
and has come to life again, he was lost but he has 
beensrounds 


Chapter VII 
SOME BEAUTIFUL MIRACLES OF JESUS 


Whatever be the opinion regarding the fact of the 
miracles in the New Testament, none the less the ac- 
counts of some of them are undoubtedly beautiful. 

Moreover, a scientific, and therefore a somewhat 
skeptical, age like this should be slow about brushing 
aside all the miracles of Christ. After all, a miracle 
is simply a happening which passes our ability to ex- 
plain; and such things are occurring increasingly 
round us all the time. The radio, the submersible ship, 
the aircraft, the psychological healings, are all matters 
that a few years since we could not have explained. 
Some of them we cannot even yet explain. 

It is well to be careful therefore, how, in dealing 
with such a personality as that of Jesus, we reach too 
hasty conclusions regarding his limitations. Most of 
us would admit that his miracles, though they proved 
much apparently to his own time, are without evi- 
dential value to our age, while his words, his death, 
himself, are all-important. Nevertheless we are nar- 
row and dogmatic when we waive away all accounts 
of the marvelous in his doings; just as much so as 
if we declare the whole structure of Christianity to 
be in danger, if one doubt be cast on any or all of 
the miracles. 

Particularly is it hazardous to refuse credence to 


his healing miracles, when many just as startling are 
69 


70 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


happening to-day through the increased knowledge of 
psycho-therapeutics. Jesus, in all his utterances, as 
well as in his dealings with men and women, reveals 
himself as a master psychologist. Why is it incredible 
that he should have been an adept psychiatrist? One 
need not discount modern science in recognizing mys- 
terious powers in Jesus that we have not yet fath- 
omed. Neither need we accept as literal facts such 
manifestly legendary stories as the swine possessed, the 
fig-tree cursed and withered, or the water turned into 
wine. Let them go for what they are worth; where 
they have beauty we may enjoy it. But many of the 
cases of healing have become much more credible of 
recent years, since Sigmund Freud and his followers, 
with many exaggerations and vagaries, have unearthed 
the realm of the subconscious, or the unconscious, in 
human life. The most beautiful phase of the healing 
work of Christ is his compassion for the suffering 
multitudes, scattered, as he said, like sheep without a 
shepherd, and his recognition of the intimate relations 
between bodily and spiritual health and welfare. 

Our own age is just beginning to catch up with him 
in this regard and to recognize the impossibility of 
separating the body and the mind, or soul. “A pain 
in the mind is often a pain in the body.” It was the 
duty of Jesus, as it is of his followers, to alleviate 
both. 

In such a spirit of open-mindedness then, let us read 
certain accounts of the marvelous deeds of Christ to 
find the truth and beauty in them. ‘Truth, after all, 
is more important than fact. 

The first miracle is one of the most beautiful. It 


SOME BEAUTIFUL MIRACLES OF JESUS 71 


is cited in the marriage-service in the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer, and is the subject of that line of Richard 
Crashaw’s which won the prize for the best essay on 
the miracle at Cana: 


“The Conscious water saw its God and blushed.” 


The story reveals the genial social qualities of 
Christ, his obedience to his mother, and his sympathy 
for even the most negligible predicaments of his fellow 
mortals. John, his closest friend, is the one who 
records it, in his second chapter: 


“Two days later a wedding took place at Cana in 
Galilee; the mother of Jesus was present, and Jesus 
and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 
As the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to 
him, “They have no wine.’ ‘Woman,’ said Jesus, ‘what 
have you to do with me? My time has not come 
yet.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever 
he tells you.’ Now six stone water-jars were stand- 
ing there, for the Jewish rites of ‘purification,’ each 
holding about twenty gallons. Jesus said, ‘Fill up 
the jars with water.’ So they filled them to the brim. 
Then he said, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to 
the manager of the feast.’ They did so; and when 
the manager of the feast tasted the water which had 
become wine, not knowing where it had come from 
(though the servants who had drawn it knew), he 
called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everybody 
serves the good wine first, and then the poorer wine 
after people have drunk freely; you have kept the 


72 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


good wine till now.’ Jesus performed this, the first 
of his Signs, at Cana in Galilee, thereby displaying 
his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” 


A pathetic picture Mark draws for us, in his fifth 
chapter, of a shrinking woman who comes behind 
Jesus, hoping to avoid attention, and touches the hem 
of his garment. On account of the nature of her 
malady she desires to escape notice. Phillips Brooks 
preached a great sermon on this miracle, entitiing it, 
“The Venture of Faith.” 


“And there was a woman who had had a hemorrhage 
for twelve years—she had suffered a great deal under 
a number of doctors and had spent all her means but 
was none the better; in fact she was rather worse. 
She heard about Jesus, got behind him in the crowd, 
and touched his robe; ‘If I can touch even his clothes,’ 
she said to herself, ‘I will recover.’ And at once the 
hemorrhage stopped, and she felt in her body that she 
was cured of her complaint. Jesus was at once con- 
scious that some healing virtue had passed from him, 
so he turned round in the crowd and asked, ‘Who 
touched my clothes?’ His disciples said to him, ‘You 
see the crowd are pressing round you, and yet you 
ask, ““Who touched me?”’ But he kept looking round 
to see who had done it, and the woman, knowing what 
had happened to her, came forward in fear and trem- 
bling and fell down before him, telling him all the 
truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made 
you well; go in peace and be free from your com- 
plaint.’ ”’ 


SOME BEAUTIFUL MIRACLES OF JESUS 73 


Another story both in Matthew’s gospel and in 
Mark’s, full of the human element, is laid in “‘his 
own city,’ Capharnahum, so-called, no doubt, because 
it was the nearest large city to his home at Nazaret, 
and his frequent resort. The fallen Roman columns 
still lying on its site, at the northern end of the Lake 
of Galilee, mutely tell of a once proud metropolis. 
According to Mark, his friends bring the sick man 
to Jesus and, finding the Master in a house teaching, 
surrounded by a great crowd, they break up the roof 
and let down the bed on which the patient lies. The 
fragile character of oriental roofs makes their re- 
moval, as in this story, easily possible. The enter- 
prise of the four friends in the narrative strikes a 
responsive chord in our hearts. The bickering of the 
Master’s enemies is strictly in character; and the pos- 
sibly sinful origin of the man’s disease, if not known 
then, is all too well known now. 

The story according to Matthew adds other striking 
details (Matthew IX: 1-8): 


“So he embarked in the boat and crossed over to 
his own town. There a paralytic was brought to him, 
lying on a pallet; and when Jesus saw the faith of 
the bearers he said to the paralytic, ‘Courage, my 
son! your sins are forgiven.’ Some scribes said to 
themselves, “The man is talking blasphemy! Jesus 
saw what they were thinking and said, “Why do you 
think evil in your hearts? Which is the easier thing, 
to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Rise and 
walk’? But to let you see the Son of man has power 
on earth to forgive sins’—he then said to the paralytic, 


74 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


‘Get up, lift your pallet, and go home.’ And he got 
up and went home. The crowds who saw it were awed 
and glorified God for giving such power to men.” 


Among the scourges of the East, perhaps the worst 
of all is leprosy, because of its contagious character, 
and the necessary isolation, loneliness, and privation 
of the sufferers. As one sees these poor creatures 
by country roadsides. in the East, or hovering in the 
environs of the cities begging, his heart beats with 
an unforgettable pain of sympathy. In the center of 
Damascus is a high wall enclosing the leper settle- 
ment, and one may see the inmates only through iron 
bars. The sight is piteous. 

This disease is frequently and aptly used as a figure 
for sin. Luke, in the seventeenth chapter, tells of ten 
lepers whom Jesus healed. Only one of them, and he 
a hated Samaritan, had grace and gratitude enough to 
come and thank him. It is easy for us, not only to 
forget our sufferings, but also to forget the good 
physicians who relieve us. 


“On entering one village he was met by ten lepers 
who stood at a distance and lifted up their voice, say- 
ing, “Jesus, master, have pity on us.’ Noticing them 
he said, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ 
And as they went away they were cleansed. Now one 
of them turned back when he saw he was cured, 
glorifying God with a loud voice; and he fell on his 
face at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. The man 
was a Samaritan. So Jesus said, ‘Were all the ten 
not cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was there 


SOME BEAUTIFUL MIRACLES OF JESUS 75 


no one to return and give glory to God except this 
foreigner?’ And he said to him, “Get up and go, your 
faith has made you well.’ ”’ 


Afflictions of the eyes are common to this day in 
the Orient. The glare of sunlight on sand, the dust, 
the myriad flies, and the nameless contagions that the 
East has no science to combat, contribute to the sum 
of blindness. Jesus, we are told, opened many blind 
eyes; but the tale of Bartimaeus of Jericho, with his 
persistence, his importunity, his faith, is perhaps the 
most touching of them all. Giving sight to the blind 
is so like giving light to darkened minds that the com- 
parison is inevitable. 


“Then they reached Jericho; and as he was leaving 
Jericho with his disciples and a considerable crowd, 
the son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus, the blind beggar who 
sat beside the road, heard it was Jesus of Nazaret. 
So he started to shout, ‘Son of David! Jesus! have 
pity on me.’ A number of the people checked him and 
told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 
‘Son of David, have pity on me!’ Jesus stopped and 
said, ‘Call him.’ Then they called the blind man and 
told him, ‘Courage! Get up, he is calling you.’ 
Throwing off his cloak he jumped up and went to 
Jesus. Jesus spoke to him and said, ‘What do you 
want me to do for you? The blind man said, ‘Rab- 
boni, I want to regain my sight.’ Then Jesus said, 
‘Go, your faith has made you well;’ and he regained 
his sight at once and followed Jesus along the road.” 


Chapter VIII 
SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 


The literary art reaches its height, perhaps, in the 
shaping of short, sharp, and yet profound sentences 
that stick in the mind as if they were barbed. It re- 
quires less skill to convey a great idea in many and 
laborious words than to illuminate it with a sudden 
flash. It is not always the size of a picture that meas- 
ures its greatness. 

Jesus shows himself adept in the painting of mini- 
atures. It may perhaps be asserted that he is remem- 
bered as much for his epigrams as for his longer 
parables and discourses. These packed sentences have 
found lodgment in millions of minds. Once heard 
they can never be forgotten. 

The beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on 
the Mount in the fifth chapter of Matthew, already 
quoted under the head of the poetry of Jesus, have 
embedded themselves in the memories of men. They 
still sound paradoxical, extreme, almost unbelievable, 
although the world, after two thousand years, is grad- 
ually beginning to grasp their profound truth. 

Then the Master makes the two apt comparisons: 
“You are the salt of the earth’ and “You are the light 
of the world.” 

The positive character of his mission he could not 
state more happily and tersely than in this same 


chapter : 
76 


SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 77 


““Do not imagine I have come to destroy the Law 
or the prophets; I have not come to destroy but to 
Fifill)’ ”” 


The searching character of the Sermon on the 
Mount, its emphasis upon the motive as the test of 
the deed, its theme that what is within the heart mat- 
ters, not what is in the ouward condition, bearing 
or action, cannot but impress one who reads its pithy 
sentences: 


“You have heard how it used to be said, Do not 
commit adultery. But I tell you, any one who even 
looks with lust at a woman has committed adultery 
with her already in his heart.’ ”’ 


He combats a number of wise sayings of the fathers 
of his race, putting in place of them wiser ones of 
his own: 


“You have heard the saying, An eye for an eye 
and a tooth for a tooth. 
But I tell you, you are not to resist an injury: 
whoever strikes you on the right cheek, 
turn the other to him as well; 
whoever wants to sue you for your shirt, 
let him have your coat as well; 
whoever forces you to go one mile, 
go two miles with him; 
give to the man who begs from you, 
and turn not away from him who wants to 
borrow.” 


78 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


The sixth of Matthew amply demonstrates how 
certain sayings of Jesus have passed into proverbs, 
known by all of us from childhood, so that we 
speak them even while scarcely conscious of their 
origin. 


“When you give alms, 
make no flourish of trumpets like the hypocrites 
in the synagogues and the streets, 
so as to win applause from men; 
I tell you truly, they do get their reward. 
When you give alms, 
do not let your left hand know what your right 
hand is doing, 
so as to keep your alms secret; 
then your Father who sees what is secret will 
reward you openly.” 


“For where your treasure lies, 
your heart will lie there too.” 


“‘No man can serve two masters; 
either he will hate one and love the other, 
or else he will stand by the one and despise 
the other— 
you cannot serve both God and Mammon.”’ 


In the same chapter is a luminous comparison of the 
inward light that follows upon clearness and integrity 
of motive. Nothing could be more convincing to a 
people afflicted, as so many of these orientals were, 
with optical disease or defect: 


SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS: 79 


“The eye is the lamp of the body: 
so, if your Eye is generous, 

the whole of your body will be illumined, 
but if your eye is selfish, 

the whole of your body will be darkened. 
And if your very light turns dark, 

then—what a darkness it is!” 


He gives a new turn in the next chapter to the same 
idea, in the comparison of the splinter and the plank, 
or stake: 


““Why do you note the splinter in your brother’s 
eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye? How 
can you say to your brother, “Let me take out the 
splinter from your eye,’ when there lies the plank in 
your own eye?” 


He uses homely, concrete illustrations to convey 
spiritual truths, and with them introduces his golden 
rule: 


“Why, which of you, when asked by his son for a 
loaf, will hand him a stone? 
Or, if he asks a fish, will you hand him a serpent? 
Well, if for all your evil you know to give your 
children what is good, 
how much more will your Father in heaven give 
good gifts to those who ask him? 
Well then, whatever you would like men to do to 
you, do just the same to them; that is the mean- 
ing of the Law and the prophets.’ ”’ 


80 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


He leaves two images in our speech forever: 


“Beware of false prophets; they come to you with 
the garb of sheep but at heart they are ravenous 
wolves. Hd 

You will know them by their fruit; do men gather 
grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? No.’ ” 


A certain scribe wanted to follow Jesus wherever 
he went. The Master answered him: 


“The foxes have their holes, 
the wild birds have their nests, 
but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.’ ” 


Another wanted to wait until he had buried his 
father: 


““Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own 
deadii:7 


There is a fine irony in his answer to the Pharisees 
who criticize him for consorting with publicans and 
other outcasts: 


““Those who are strong have no need of a 
doctor, but those who are ill . . . For I have not 
come to call just men but sinners.’ ” 


The worldly wisdom and the felicity of utterance, 
in his instructions to the twelve whom he sent out on 
a mission, must have made deep impression on them: 


SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 81 


““T am sending you out like sheep among wolves; 
so be wise like serpents and guileless like doves. ... 
Have no fear of those who kill the body but cannot 
kill the soul: 

rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and 
body in Gehenna. 
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? 
Yet not one of them will fall to the ground 
unless your Father wills it... . 
Every one who will acknowledge me before men, 
I will acknowledge him before my Father 


Imeeaven; vay 
“Do not imagine I have come to bring peace on 
earth; 
I have not come to bring peace but a 
SWOrdi Hs cc, 


“He who loves father or mother more than me 
is not worthy of me; 
he who loves son or daughter more than me 
is not worthy of me:... 
He who has found his life will lose it, 
and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.’ ” 
Vividly Jesus states a great economic and spiritual 
law: 


“ ‘For he who has, to him shall more be given ana 
richly given, 
but whoever has not, from him shall be taken even 
what he has.’ ”’ 


Once after one of his discourses, he exclaims: 


82 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


6é 


‘I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, 
for hiding all this from the wise and learned and re- 
vealing it to the simple-minded.’ ” 


Accused by the Pharisees of doing his good works 
through the power of Satan, he replies: 


“““Any realm divided against itself comes to ruin, 
any city or house divided against itself will never 
stand.’ ” 


Then Matthew’s account adds pointedly: 


“““He who is not with me is against me, 
and he who does not gather with me scatters.’ ” 


He further retorts against the hostility and envy 
of his enemies: 


“For the mouth utters what the heart is full of.’ ”’ 


Concerning the criticism that he violated the sab- 
bath, Jesus replies with a great moral precept, appli- 
cable to all such questions: 


“And he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for 
man, not man for the sabbath: 


so that the Son of man is Lord even over the 
sabbath’ 


Rejected by his own close neighbors, Jesus utters a 
proverb that has had world-wide recognition : 


SOME EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 83 


“*A prophet never goes without honour except in 
his native place and in his home.’ ” 


In answer to those who were absorbed in the ob- 
servance of ritual, in ceremonial cleanness and unclean- 
ness, watching what and how they ate, rather than 
what and how they did and spoke and thought, he 
declares : 


“ “Tt is not what enters a man’s mouth that defiles him, 
what defiles a man is what comes out of his mouth.’ ” 


After Simon Peter has confessed Jesus to be the 
Christ, the Son of God, the Master makes a play 
upon Simon’s name, comparing him to a rock (Petros), 
in a remarkable sentence: 


“ “Now I tell you, Peter is your name and on 
this rock I will build my church; the powers of 
Hades shall not succeed against it.’”’ 


Upon every one of these texts, countless sermons 
have been preached, and the subjects are not even yet 
quite exhausted. Indeed most of these epigrams we 
still do not believe, or do not understand. 


Chapter IX 
MORE EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 


In the sixteenth chapter of Matthew Jesus adds 
certain epigrams concerning the danger and the reward 
of following in his steps: 


“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If any one wishes 
to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his 
cross, and so follow me: 

for whoever wants to save his life will lose it, 
and whoever loses his life for my sake will 
find it. 
What profit will it be if a man gains the whole 
world and forfeits his own soul? What will a man 
offer as an equivalent for his soul? ”’ 


Jesus uttered many words which were then re- 
garded as “hard sayings,” and still may be so regarded: 


““T tell you truly, if you had faith the size of a 
grain of mustard-seed, you could say to this hill, 
“Move from here to there,’ and remove it would; 
nothing would be impossible for you.’ ”’ 


He uttered many which were tender: 


“““Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is 


the greatest in the Realm of heaven.’ ” 
84 


MORE EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 85 


“Tet the children alone, do not stop them from 
coming to me; the Realm of heaven belongs to such 
as these.’ ”’ 


Discussing marriage he offers a word that will 
probably remain forever in the Christian marriage 
service : 


“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What 
God has joined, then, man must not separate.’ ” 


Concerning the dangers of riches he utters himself 
pointedly, even if hyperbolically : 


““T tell you again, it is easier for a camel to get 
through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to get into 
the Realm of God. . . . This is impossible for men, 
but anything is possible for God.’ ”’ 


Life does for us just what Jesus says it will, selects 
us, sifts us, chooses and rejects us: 


“ “Many who are first shall be last, and many who 
are last shall be first.” 


The principle of choice is just what he says it is: 


“Whoever wants to be great among you must be 
your servant, and whoever wants to be first among 
you must be your slave; just as the Son of man 
has not come to be served but to serve, 

and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ ” 


86 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


In crossing swords with the Pharisees, his enemies, 
he declares our proper attitude toward church and 
State: 


“Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give God 
what belongs to God.’”’ 


Discussing immortality he declares: 
“ “He is not a God of dead people but of living.’ ” 
He sums up his ethical code: 


“*You must love the Lord your God with your 
whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your 
whole mind. This is the greatest and chief com- 
mand. There is a second like it: you must love 
your neighbour as yourself. The whole Law and 
the prophets hang upon these two commands.’ ” 


The twenty-third chapter of Matthew contains his 
eight terrible “woes,” pronounced against the Pharisees. 
We quote two of them: 


““Woe to you, you impious scribes and Pharisees! 
you tithe mint and dill and cummin, 
and omit the weightier matters of the law, 
justice and mercy and faithfulness; 
these latter you ought to have practised—without 

omitting the former. 

Blind guides that you are, 
filtering away the gnat and swallowing the camel! 


MORE EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 87 


Woe to you, you irreligious scribes and Pharisees! 
you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, 
but inside they are filled with your rapacity and 
self-indulgence.’ ”’ 


The twenty-fourth chapter is one of prediction com- 
monly believed to refer to his second coming. 


“““Wherever the body lies, 

there will the vultures gather. ... 

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words 

will never pass away... . 

Then there will be two men in the field, 
one will be taken and one will be left; 

two women will be grinding at the millstone, 
one will be taken and one will be left... . 

There men will wail and gnash their teeth.’ ” 


When he is anointed by a loving woman, from her 
alabaster box, and objection is made that the money 
involved should have been given to the’ poor, he re- 
plies: 


“*The poor you always have beside you, but you 
will not always have me.’ ” 


The Lord’s Supper is instituted in terse sentences 
that we still employ: 


“As they were eating he took a loaf and after 
the blessing he broke it; then he gave it to the 
disciples saying, ‘Take and eat this, it means my 


88 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


body.’ He also took a cup and after thanking God 
he gave it to them saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you; 
this means my blood, the new covenant-blood, shed 
for many, to win the remission of their sins.’ ” 


When Simon attacks Malchus and wounds him, 
Jesus rebukes Simon in words that have ever since 
proved true in human experience: 


“Put your sword back into its place; all who 
draw the sword shall die by the sword.’ ” 


There is much epigrammatic material in the gospel 
of John, and of a slightly different tone. A few in- 
stances will suffice to convey the distinction. In his 
talk with Nicodemus in the night, Jesus begins: 


““Truly, truly I tell you, no one can see God’s 
Realm unless he is born from above.’ ” 


He continues with a delicate comparison: 

““The wind blows where it wills; you can hear 
its sound, but you never know where it has come from 
or where it goes: it is the same with every one who 
is born of the spirit.’ ” 


And a glowing antithesis: 


“God did not send his Son into the world to pass 
sentence on it, but to save the world by him.’ ” 


MORE EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 89 


Another vivid contrast: 


““For any one whose practices are corrupt loathes 
the light and will not come out into it, in case his 
actions are exposed, whereas any one whose life is true 
comes out into the light, to make it plain that his actions 
have been divinely prompted.’ ”’ 


John the Baptist is cited in this same chapter as 
the author of a well-known epigram: 


“He must wax, I must wane.’ ” 


In the fourth chapter of John, Christ utters the 
aphorism: 


“ ‘God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship 
him in Spirit and in reality.’ ” 


He makes this startling comparison: 


***T am the bread of life; he who comes to me will 
never be hungry, and he who believes in me will never 
be thirsty again.’ ” 


He states clearly and concisely the principle that 
teligion has its origin in the will, not merely in the 
intellect : 


“Any one who chooses to do his will, shall un- 
derstand whether my teaching comes from God or 
whether I am talking on my own authority.’ ” 


90 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


In the story about the woman caught in sin, and 
condemned under the Jewish law to death by stoning, 
Jesus reaches the conscience with a word: 


“ “Let the innocent among you throw the first stone 
at her,” 


Here also he utters such telling phrases as these: 


‘“*T am the light of the world: he who follows me 
will not walk in darkness, he will enjoy the light of 
litexcanire 

“*You will understand the truth, and the truth will 
set you free... . Truly, truly I tell you, I have ex- 
isted before Abraham was born.’ ” 


Other epigrams illustrate, as almost all these sayings 
do, how familiar have become these pointed utterances 
of Christ: 


“While daylight lasts, we must be busy with the 
work of God: night comes, when no one can do any 
work.’ ”’ 

“*The thief only comes to steal, to slay, and to de- 
stroy: I have come that they may have life and have 
it to the full.’” 


The opening of the burial service of the church has 
long followed the words of Jesus concerning Lazarus: 


““T am myself resurrection and life: 
he who believes in me will live, even if he dies, 


MORE EPIGRAMS OF JESUS 91 


and no one who lives and believes in me will ever 
die 5 Sh bp | 


Concerning his own death by hanging on the cross, 
he declares: 


““But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will 
draw all men to myself.’ ” 


Concerning the future life: 


““Let not your hearts be disquieted; you believe— 
believe in God and also in me. In my Father’s house 
there are many abodes; were it not so, would I have 
told you I was going to prepare a place for you?’ ” 


Then he adds: 


“Peace I leave to you, my peace I give to you; I 
give it not as the world gives its “Peace!’’ Let not 
your hearts be disquieted or timid.’ ” 


He announces other universal principles: 


“*To lay life down for his friends, man has no 
greater love than that.’ ”’ 

“And this is eternal life, that they know thee, the 
only real God, and him whom thou hast sent, even 
Jesus Christ.’ ” 


Chapter X 
JESUS DEALING WITH MEN 


The work of an expert always attracts the eye and 
shows grace of movement, delicacy of touch, and no 
lost motion. If the materials with which he works 
are human beings, his management becomes doubly 
interesting. Jesus reveals his knowledge of men and 
his skill in dealing with them. 

The love which he held for nature extended to hu- 
man nature. He possessed what every great literary 
man must have, an understanding of his fellow men 
and a sympathy with them. Jesus, keenly alive to all 
the issues in human life, apparently delights in solving 
for men and women their perplexities. 

The characters sketched by the evangelists stand out 
clearly upon the page and endure in human memory. 
They are the products of skillful narration; for little 
is ever told to describe them; they are left to picture 
themselves by word and action. 


ZACCHAEUS, THE RICH OUTCAST 


A publican, or tax-gatherer, held about the same 
position in society in Christ’s day that a saloon-keeper 
once did in America, a bootlegger now, or a profes- 
sional gambler. For a religious teacher or any one 
in good social standing, to be seen in his company 
shocked all beholders. Rome, the master oppressor, 


farmed out the taxes to the highest bidder; and in turn 
92 


JESUS DEALING WITH MEN 93 


the tax-contractor wrung from the people the most he 
could. Naturally the contractor and his employees 
were cordially hated. These were the publicans. 

Something in the nature of this man Zacchaeus 
prompted a curiosity to see the Nazarene. Many a 
social outcast so desires to look from afar upon the 
great and good; for they are not all bad, or entirely 
bad, whom society ostracizes. The accusation “mere 
curiosity” suggests the pharisaical mind, then and 
now, as curiosity is one of the immortal attributes 
of humanity. Zacchaeus runs ahead of the mob sur- 
rounding Jesus, climbs a sycamore tree, in the “City 
of Palms,” because he is short of stature, in order that 
he may see over the heads of taller men. 

Eagerness, enthusiasm, enterprise, appear in the ac- 
tions of this little man; yet not one of these qualities 
is directly mentioned in the story. Luke, the evan- 
gelist, tells of it, in his own vivid fashion, in chapter 
nineteen : 


“Then he entered Jericho. And as he passed through 
it, there was a man called Zacchaeus, the head of the 
taxgatherers, a wealthy man, who tried to see what 
Jesus was like; but he could not, on account of the 
crowd—for he was small of stature. So he ran for- 
ward and climbed into a sycomore tree to get a sight 
of him, as he was to pass that road. But when Jesus 
reached the spot he looked up and said to him, ‘Zac- 
chaeus, come down at once, for I must stay at your 
house to-day.’ He came down at once and welcomed 
him gladly. But when they saw this, every one began 
to mutter that he had gone to be the guest of a sinner. 


94 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


So Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, ‘I will 
give the half of all I have, Lord, to the poor, and if 
I have cheated anybody I will give him back four 
times as much.’ And Jesus said of him, ‘To-day sal- 
vation has come to this house, since Zacchaeus here is 
a son of Abraham. For the Son of man has come to 
seek and save the lost.’ ” 


It is unnecessary to call to the attention of the dis- 
cerning the skill in this narrative. The words stand 
out from ‘the «page: “ran,” “clinibed, > atv once 
“gladly.” At the dinner, as all reclined, Zacchaeus, 
moving about, “stopped,” and his conscience spoke. 

It is superfluous to ask the sympathetic to watch 
the behavior of Jesus throughout the brief story; how 
he recognizes a kindred spirit in the rich little man; 
how he sees the aspiration underneath the sordid, 
material exterior; how he meets with approbation the 
new resolution which the hard-fisted publican takes. 


A MAN WRAPPED UP IN RICHES 


The love which Jesus bore for human nature, even 
imperfect human nature, appears in the story of the 
rich young ruler who so enthusiastically came inquir- 
ing the road to salvation. Jesus loved him not for his 
wealth, not even for his youth. A man was a man 
to Christ regardless of exterior or place. This young 
man possessed a certain enthusiastic charm captivating 
to the Master in spite of the flaw in the inner life. 
Jesus looked into him, saw the ulcer beneath the fair 
surface, and with his unerring lancet pierced to it. 
Mark tells the tale (Mark X: 17-22): 


JESUS DEALING WITH MEN 95 


“As he went out on the road a man ran up and 
knelt down before him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, 
‘what must I do to inherit life eternal?’ Jesus said 
to him, ‘Why call me “good”? No one is good, no 
one but God. You know the commands: do not kill, 
do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear 
false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and 
mother.’ ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘I have observed all these 
commands from my youth.’ Jesus looked at him and 
loved him. ‘There is one thing you want,’ he said, 
‘go and sell all you have; give the money to the poor 
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, take 
up the cross, and follow me.’ But his face fell at that, 
and he went sadly away, for he had great possessions.” 


NICODEMUS, THE PHARISEE 


A very different ruler, Nicodemus the Pharisee, for 
reasons of expediency, sought Jesus out by night. The 
colloquy that took place startles us by the ingenuity 
of Christ no less than by the profundity. He seems 
to possess a perfect insight into the Pharisaic mind 
and to discern that the wit of Nicodemus is only ap- 
parently, not really, slow. Nevertheless he shows no 
impatience or hostility, but treats the quibbler with 
courtesy and kindness as if he were altogether sincere. 
One has the feeling, before their talk is over, that all 
posing has vanished from Nicodemus. ‘The tradition 
goes that Nicodemus became a Christian; certainly 
later on he spoke boldly in behalf of Christ. 


“Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who 
belonged to the Jewish authorities; he came one night 


96 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


to Jesus and said, ‘Rabbi, we know you have come 
from God to teach us, for no one could perform these 
Signs of yours unless God were with him.’ Jesus 
replied, ‘Truly, truly I tell you, no one can see God's 
Realm unless he is born from above.’ Nicodemus said 
to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? 
Can he enter his mother’s womb over again and be 
born?’ Jesus replied, ‘Truly, truly I tell you, unless 
one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter 
God’s Realm.’ ”’ 


Jesus, recognizing the spiritual fitness of his hearer, 
begins this conversation on a high level and keeps it 
there. Nicodemus tries to fence and quibble, but Jesus 
brushes aside his interferences and questions with a 
firm courtesy, and pursues the even tenor of his high 
way of discussion. There is increasing respect and 
awe manifest in the bearing of Nicodemus. The aged 
rabbi bows before the spiritual wisdom of the young 
one, just as old India has, in our own time, bowed to 
the young seers, Gandhi and Tagore. It is not at all 
incredible that, even as tradition holds, Nicodemus ul- 
timately became a Christian. The references made by 
Jesus at the close of this conversation to those who 
love evil not daring to come to the light, contain per- 
haps a courteous rebuke to his interlocutor for coming 
in the night time. 


THOMAS, THE SKEPTIC AND HERO 


Quite a different doubter and inquirer appears in 
that one of his own disciples whose name has become 


JESUS DEALING WITH MEN 97 


the synonym for doubt—Thomas. And quite differ- 
ently does Jesus treat him. We know Thomas well— 
slow-witted, heavy-handed, conservative, bucolic, but 
faithful. In the account of the raising of Lazarus, 
when the disciples reason with Jesus about going into 
the hotbed of dangers at Jerusalem, and when the 
Master sets his face like flint to go thither, it is this 
doubter of all others who cries: 

“Let us also go, that we may die with him.” 

There are worse things than doubt. There are qual- 
ities that drown doubt; love is one of these. ‘Thomas 
did not understand his Lord; did not claim to dissect 
him and say how much of him was human, how much 
divine; did not presume to define and tabulate him, 
or to put him into a dogma or a proposition; but he 
loved the Nazarene with a love ready to go to death, 
and that did finally go to the cross. Tennyson cries: 


“There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds.” 


Consequently Jesus bears, in the tenderest fashion, 
with the slowness and hesitancy of Thomas. In the 
fourteenth chapter of John, when Jesus is trying to 
still the troubled hearts of the twelve after the an- 
nouncement of his forthcoming death, Our Lord 
speaks tenderly to Thomas, and still later, after the 
resurrection, he treats Thomas with marked consider- 
ation. 

“ ‘Lord,’ said Thomas at the last supper, ‘we do 
not know where you are going, and how are we to 
know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the real 
and living way; no one comes to the Father except by 


98 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


means of me. If you knew me, you would know my 
Father too. You know him now and you have seen 
hin 


SIMON PETER, LEADER OF THE TWELVE 


Numerous other persons with whom Jesus dealt 
ought, of right, to come upon the scene in this chap- 
ter; but the four gospels cannot all be reproduced here. 
It is impossible, however, to pass over the outstanding 
character in the Master’s retinue, the chiefest of the 
twelve, the rock apostle, Simon Peter. 

Human and faulty, but warm and generous, he cap- 
tures every imagination. He is the first named in all 
lists of the twelve. Later he sees the Master on the 
lake in the night and, stepping out of the boat, tries 
to walk to him on the water. He refuses to let the 
Master wash his feet at the passover supper; but when 
told that unless his feet be so washed he can have no 
part nor lot in the Realm of Heaven, he demands: 
“Not my feet only, but my hands and my head!” 
When Jesus informs the twelve that they will all 
desert him, Simon cries: “Though all forsake you, yet 
will not I!’ Then he is told—unbelievable word— 
that before the cock crow twice he will deny his Lord 
thrice. When Jesus declares that he is going away 
where his disciples cannot follow him until later, Peter 
inquires eagerly: “Lord, why cannot I follow you 
now?” When Jesus is betrayed in the Garden of 
Gethsemane, Peter draws a sword and strikes at the 
guards, wounding one; then before daybreak he curses 
and swears that he never knew the Galilean. 


JESUS DEALING WITH MEN 99 


The bearing of Jesus towards Simon after the de- 
nial, the crucifixion, the resurrection, touches the 
reader. His repeated question to Simon, “Do you 
love me?’ carries an accusing yet forgiving love that 
must have wrung tears from the rough fisherman’s 
eyes. Jesus remembers Peter’s boast that he would 
be faithful even if all these others went away, and 
asks Simon now: “Do you love me more than the 
others do?’ It is John, “the beloved,” the most inti- 
mate, disciple who tells this story, one of the most 
poignant of all the pathetic incidents in the Bible: 


“Then after breakfast Jesus said to Simon Peter, 
‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than the 
others do?’ ‘Why, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know I love 
you.’ ‘Then feed my lambs,’ said Jesus. Again he 
asked him for the second time, ‘Simon, son of John, 
do you love me?’ ‘Why, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know I 
love you.’ “Then be a shepherd to my sheep,’ said 
Jesus. For the third time he asked him, ‘Simon, son 
of John, do you love me?’ Now Peter was vexed 
at being asked the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ So 
he replied: ‘Lord, you know everything, you can see 
I love you.’ Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep. Truly, 
truly I tell you, you put on your own girdle and went 
wherever you wanted, when you were young; but 
when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands 
for some one to gird you, and you will be taken where 
you have no wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate 
the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God) : 
then he added, ‘Follow me.’ ” 


Chapter XI 
JESUS DEALING WITH WOMEN 


Men reveal themselves in their attitude toward 
women. The manner, the word, the very eye itself, 
tells the story of the man. Condescension, the patron- 
izing air, undue levity,—these only show the un- 
worthy views cherished by the man. On the other 
hand, respect, the bearing of equality, becoming grav- 
ity,—these characterize the larger man, the larger 
view. High-minded men take high-minded ground 
concerning women. Witness the lines of C. Mackay, 
in the Praise of Women: 


“Woman may err, woman may give her mind 
To evil thoughts, and lose her pure estate; 
But, for one woman who affronts her kind 
By wicked passions and remorseless hate, 
A thousand make amends in age and youth, 
By heavenly pity, by sweet sympathy, 

By patient kindness, by enduring truth, 
By love, supremest in adversity.” 


When Christ came, women, both in his own coun- 
try and in Greek and Roman circles, were under per- 
petual tutelage either to father, husband, brother, or 
guardian. Woman could not inherit except in failure 
of a male relative of the same degree. She could not 


testify in the courts, except with the consent of her 
100 


JESUS DEALING WITH WOMEN 101 


natural guardian. She was more a possession than a 
person. In Athens men occupied the front of the 
house, women the rear. They ate and lived sepa- 
rately. In Palestine men sat in the main body of the 
synagogue, women behind a lattice work in the rear. 
No wonder women followed, with their ministrations 
and great personal devotion, the man who struck the 
first blow at their chains. Women lovingly followed 
Jesus then—and follow him to-day. 


THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA 


The valley of Sychar lies, green and fair, between 
two mountains, Ebal and Gerizim, the whole scene full 
of the associations of ancient Jewish legendry. Here 
is Jacob’s well, where the fabled father of the people 
of Israel watered his flocks and outwitted his wily 
father-in-law, Laban. Here to-day all caravans pause 
for refreshment, Russian pilgrims in great throngs, 
bearded and dusty from their long journey afoot, and 
Europeans and Americans beside their carriages or 
camels. 

Here at this well Jesus met the woman of Sychar, 
the mountains looking down upon the hot midday 
scene, the dry curbstone of the well, the mud-hut town 
drowsing across the valley, the curl of blue smoke 
rising straight in the still air, as it rises to this day, 
from the Samaritan altar on the sacred top of Gerizim, 
the soft deep silence of noon over it all. The loneli- 
ness of this woman is apparent, who chooses the mid- 
day hour to come to the well, when the other women 
are not there. Her reticence gives way, when Jesus 


102 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


asks her for a drink, to coyness, and even to jesting 
and coquetry. Then the smile freezes on her face as, 
with gentle gravity, Jesus remarks: 

“Tf you knew what is the free gift of God and 
who is asking you for a drink, you would have asked 
him instead, and he would have given you “living” 
water.’ ” 

She then takes refuge in argument, even in theo- 
logical disputation,. as people always do when the 
sword of the spirit probes deeper and deeper into sen- 
sitive consciences. Jesus persistently presses the point 
into her personal life. At last the woman throws 
down all defenses: 

“Ah, sir,’ said the woman, ‘give me this water, so 
that I need not thirst or come all this road to draw 
water.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Go and call your husband, 
then come back here.’ The woman replied, ‘I have 
no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You were right in 
saying, “I have no husband”; you have had five hus- 
bands, and he whom you have now espoused is not 
your husband. That was a true word.’ ‘Sir,’ said 
the woman, ‘I see you are a prophet. Now our ances- 
tors worshipped on this mountain, whereas you Jews 
declare the proper place for worship is at Jerusalem.’ 
‘Woman,’ said Jesus, “believe me, the time is coming 
when you will be worshipping the Father neither on this 
mountain nor at Jerusalem. You are worshipping 
something you do not know; we are worshipping what 
we do know—for salvation comes from the Jews. But 
the time is coming, it has come already, when the real 
worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in 
reality; for these are the worshippers that the Father 


JESUS DEALING WITH WOMEN 103 


wants. God is Spirit, and his worshippers must wor- 
ship him in Spirit and in reality.’ The woman said 
to him, ‘Well, I know messiah (which means Christ) 
is coming. When he arrives, he will explain it all 
to us.’ ‘I am messiah,’ said Jesus, ‘I who am talking 
to you.’ ”’ 

His disciples returned at this point from Sychar, 
where they had gone to buy food. They showed sur- 
prise at the colloquy between their master and this 
woman, who had slipped out so surreptitiously to the 
well, but such was their deep respect for him, they 
said nothing. As for her, there followed fast upon 
her deepening conviction a sense of relief, of joy, of 
exultation; she abandoned her water-pot, made haste 
into the city, told all the men she met, not the women, 
that messiah had appeared, and cried: ‘Come here, 
look at a man who has told me everything I ever 
did!” 

It is a tale full of deep human interest, pathos, 
tragedy, ending in joy. It is the resolving of a long- 
time mental conflict, the recovery from an unbearable 
complex of a fettered soul. 


MARY AND MARTHA 


Heinrich Hoffman painted a picture, that has be- 
come a great favorite, of a villa vine-covered and sun- 
bathed in the suburbs of an eastern city. In the fore- 
ground are two figures in oriental garb—a man seated, 
and, on a low hassock facing him, an oriental maiden. 
Her rich hair is bound in silver fillets; a tiny sandaled 
foot peeps from under her flowing robe; her big dark 


104 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


eyes are looking up intently into his face. In the 
background is another oriental maiden, bearing in her 
hands a platter with necessaries for the table and turn- 
ing a half-impatient glance upon the pair in the fore- 
ground. There can be no mistaking that group; it is 
Martha, busied and careful for many things, and Mary 
seated at the feet of Jesus. It is more, it is a picture 
of the world’s womanhood choosing the better part, 
sitting at the feet of him who set her free. 

The ruins of Bethany, just over the shoulder of the 
Mount of Olives, eastward a couple of miles from 
Jerusalem, is one of the most attractive spots in the 
environs of the Holy City. The wonderful view to- 
ward the Jordan and the Dead Sea on the one hand, 
domes and minarets of the city on the other, and above 
all the recollection that here on this little plot of ground 
Jesus loved best to stay when in the neighborhood of 
Jerusalem, all combine to give the heaps of stones on 
this ledge of hilltop a powerful appeal to the imagina- 
tion. | 

Bethany probably possessed the best suburban resi- 
dences of the ancient city. Here Simon, the rich 
Pharisee, lived, surrounded, no doubt, by others of 
his class. Here also lived Lazarus with Mary and 
Martha, his sisters, the friends with whom Jesus seems 
always to have stayed when he came up to Jerusalem. 
Vines cover the site to-day; vines and flowers must 
have clambered and bloomed over it then. These 
young people, therefore, were probably of the well- 
to-do merchant class, fully able to entertain in a be- 
coming manner any visitor. In this friendship Jesus 
reveals his utter disregard for the worldly condition 


JESUS DEALING WITH WOMEN 105 


of those with whom he came into contact. He did 
not specially seek out the poor, as such; he was just 
indifferent entirely in the matter; people were people 
to him. 

The contrast in the characters of these two sisters 
is drawn, vivid and clear, in the gospel story. With 
the highest skill, nothing is told about them; they are 
made to act and speak for themselves and so to reveal 
themselves. Martha is the bustling housekeeper, her 
thought and her life material in a high degree. Mary 
is the thoughtful, the emotional, the spiritual. She is 
willing to neglect the serving, for the time being, in 
the rare privilege of communion with such a soul as 
she had never known beside. Later, in a rush of 
enthusiasm, she broke open her alabaster box, or cruse 
of rich perfume and poured it, in the midst of a feast, 
upon the Master’s head and feet. The striking fact 
is that Jesus apparently regarded Martha with the 
same depth of affection that he felt for Mary. He 
loved both these women with a profound spiritual love. 
His mind was large enough and tolerant enough to 
comprehend the limitations in the minds of others. 
Luke, at the end of the tenth chapter, sets the picture 
before us with a few skillful strokes: 


“Tn the course of their journey he entered a certain 
village, and a woman called Martha welcomed him to 
her house. She had a sister called Mary, who seated 
herself at the feet of the Lord to listen to his talk. 
Now Martha was so busy attending to them that she 
grew worried; she came up and said, ‘Lord, is it all 
one to you that my sister has left me to do all the 


106 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


work alone? Come, tell her to lend me a hand.’ The 
Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, Mary has chosen 
the best dish, and she is not to be dragged away 
fromiitae 


The story of the anointing, told by John in chap- 
ter twelve, is one of the most colorful in the New 
Testament : 


“Six days before- the festival, Jesus came to Beth- 
any, where Lazarus stayed (whom Jesus had raised 
from the dead). They gave a supper for him there; 
Martha waited on him, and Lazarus was among those 
who reclined at table beside him. Then Mary, taking 
a pound of expensive perfume, real nard, anointed 
the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair, 
till the house was filled with the scent of the perfume. 
One of his disciples, Judas Iscariot (who was to be- 
tray him), said, ‘Why was not this perfume sold for 
ten pounds, and the money given to the poor?’ (Not 
that he cared for the poor; he said this because he was 
a thief, and because he carried the money-box and 
pilfered what was put in.) Then said Jesus, ‘Let her 
alone, let her keep what she has for the day of my 
burial. You have always the poor beside you, but 
you have not always me.’ ” 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS 


The treatment accorded by Jesus to his mother is 
the essence of courtesy and tenderness. At twelve 
years of age in the temple he answered her anxious 


JESUS DEALING WITH WOMEN 107 


inquiries with “Did you not know I had to be at my 
Father’s house?’ an enigmatic, but to her, intelligible 
expression, and then went obediently home with her. 
At the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee, he replied 
to her suggestion that the wine had failed with an 
apparently brusque, “Woman, what have you to do 
with me?” But immediately he did all and more than 
she suggested. 

When his mother and brethren came seeking him 
in the crowds, and the apostles brought him word, he 
answered with another oriental hyperbole: 


“He was still speaking to the crowds when his 
mother and brothers came and stood outside; they 
wanted to speak to him. But he replied to the man 
who told him this, ‘Who is my mother? and who 
are my brothers?’ Stretching out his hand towards 
his disciples he said, ‘Here are my mother and 
my brothers! Whoever does the will of my Father 
in heaven, that is my brother and sister and 
mother.’ ”’ 


There is no disrespect here shown to his relatives. 
He merely has seized the moment and the means to 
teach the lesson of blood kinship in the Realm of 
Heaven. His bearing towards his mother has helped 
to give her that high place she holds, the Madonna, 
the queen of all women of all times. 

Upon the cross he takes thought for his mother 
and consigns her to the care of his best earthly friend, 
the beloved John, who tells of it himself in modest 
fashion: 


108 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


‘“‘Now beside the cross of Jesus stood his mother 
and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and 
Mary of Magdala. So when Jesus saw his mother 
and his favourite disciple standing near, he said to 
his mother, ‘Woman, there is your son!’ Then he 
said to the disciple, “Son, there is your mother!’ And 
from that hour the disciple took her to his home.” 


E. S. Barrett sings concerning woman, classic words 
that sum up in a few lines what this chapter is de- 
signed to convey: 


“Not she with traitorous kiss her Saviour stung, 
Not she denied him with unholy tongue; 
She, while apostles shrank, could danger brave, 
Last at his cross and earliest at his grave.” 


Chapter XII 
THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 
Acts I and II 


Beauty, when awful, becomes grandeur. Here lies 
the charm in tragedy. The fearful beauty in the work- 
ings of fate held Athenian audiences spellbound under 
the lines of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The grand age 
in English literature is easily the age of the great 
Elizabethans with Shakespeare at the head. 

Of all the tragedies, the sublimest is the passion of 
Christ; for “to lay life down for his friends, man 
has no greater love than that.’”’ This tragedy loses 
nothing in the telling; for the story comes from men 
who witnessed it. Oberammergau and Los Angeles, 
by reproducing it in the open air, are able to move 
thousands to tears and worship. 

The last week in the life of our Lord, holding, as 
it does, heights of triumph and abysses of apparent 
defeat, comprises more of the gospel narrative than 
any similar period; and justly so, for the essence of 
the life of Jesus lies in the death. All his acts and 
words are significant, but his death means most to the 
world. There is much in the remark that “death is 
life’s most beautiful adventure.”’ The events of that 
last week, taken in the order in which they naturally 
fall, fit easily into four great acts, each in several 


scenes. 
109 


110 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Act one opens with the spectacle of the triumphal 
entry and runs into the scene in the temple area in 
which Jesus overturns the tables of the money- 
changers. 

Act two takes place on the day of the Passover. 
Scene one, Judas plots with the rulers to betray Christ. 
Scene two, the apostles Peter and John go into the 
city to find a man doing a woman’s work, carrying a 
water-jar, and follow him. Scene three, the last sup- 
per, with its exalted speeches and dramatic events. 
Scene four, the Garden of Gethsemane with the be- 
trayal and arrest. 

Act three, the great climax made up of a series of 
tragic scenes, the trials before Caiaphas, Herod, and 
Pilate, lasting from midnight to gray dawn, the purple 
robe, the crown of thorns, the scourging. Then the 
summit of the tragedy, the crucifixion, the two thieves, 
the jeering crowds and wagging tongues, the rent veil 
of the temple, the split rocks, the reeling reasons of 
men, the suicide of Judas, the seven sayings on the 
cross, the death, the new tomb of Joseph of Ari- 
mathea. 

Act four, the anti-climax, or descent from the sum- 
mit, the gradual relaxing of the tense nerves of the 
spectator after the massive third act. Here is scene 
after scene which follows the crucifixion—the women 
coming to the tomb early on the first day of the week; 
the appearance of the Lord to them in the garden; 
the running of Peter and John to the tomb; the walk 
to Emmaus; the early breakfast by the Lake of Galilee; 
the ascension. 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 111 


PeeTal, OCENE Le) bri CRTUMPHATLS RN ERY, 


The Passion week opens with the hosts of Israel 
returned from all over the world to Jerusalem for 
the Passover. All houses are crowded with guests, 
and thousands are encamped on the hillsides and in 
the valleys all round the city. Literally hundreds of 
thousands in all the garbs of the world, with all the 
sound and color of the Orient, throng the roads and 
by-paths and swarm in the city streets. Jesus, as 
usual, is a guest in the home of Mary, Martha, and 
Lazarus, at Bethany. On the first day of the week, 
he starts to walk the short distance to the city, when 
the masses of the people learn of his approach and 
rush to meet and escort him. John adds the green 
of the palm branches to the procession, which give 
to the anniversary of that day in the church calendar 
the name of “Palm Sunday.” 


“And as he was now close to the descent from the 
Hill of Olives, all the multitude of the disciples started 
joyfully to praise God with a loud voice for all they 
had seen, saying, 


“Blessed be the king who comes in the Lord’s name! 
Peace in heaven and glory in the High places!’ ”’ 


Some Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “ ‘Check 
your disciples, teacher.’’’ But he replied, *‘T tell 
you, if they were to keep quiet, the very stones would 
shout.’ ” 


112 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Jesus soon perceives that he must ride if he is not 
to be entirely prevented by the throng from reaching 
the city, and sends two of his followers to the neigh- 
boring village of Bethphage for an ass. On it he 
rides toward the Holy City. Lowly, meek, and hum- 
ble, he called himself; and humble the animal he chose 
to carry him; yet kings have ridden upon asses; and 
once this beast was the symbol of royalty. Even now, 
when we think of this opening scene of the supreme 
tragedy, this much laughed-at animal takes on a cer- 
tain dignity and pathos. Gilbert K. Chesterton has 
finely expressed this feeling that comes over us by 
putting words into the mouth of the ass himself: 


“The tattered outlaw of the earth, 
Of ancient crooked will; 

Starve, scourge, deride me; I am dumb, 
I keep my secret still. 


“Fools! For I also had my hour, 
One far fierce hour and sweet: 

There was a shout about my ears, 
And palms before my feet.” 


This stirring scene, spectacular, full of pageantry, 
song, shouts, and color, ends with a touch of pathos 
that foreshadows the dreadful close. Jesus, recogniz- 
ing the hostility of the fair-seeming city towards him- 
self and grieving not for the fate that awaits him 
but for the waywardness of the people he loves, weeps 
and laments over Jerusalem in words that even now 
wring the heart: 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 113 


“And when he saw the city, as he approached, he 
wept over it, saying, “Would that you too knew even 
to-day on what your peace depends! But no, it is 
hidden from you! A time is coming for you when 
your enemies will throw up ramparts round you and 
encircle you and besiege you on every side and raze 
you and your children within you to the ground, leav- 
ing not one stone upon another within you—and all 
because you would not understand when God was 
Visiting you.’ ” 


Scene II. Here is one of the most dramatic inci- 
dents in the career of Jesus, and, on his part, most 
daring. He enters the Temple area, where, even in 
ordinary times, there was carried on an extensive traffic 
in doves, lambs, bullocks, and all the necessaries of the 
ritual, now grown, in the Passover season, to enor- 
mous proportions, until the sacred precincts had be- 
come a bawling bedlam of hawking and trading. In- 
dignant at the profanation, the crass materialism, Jesus 
dashes to the ground the moneys and the money-bags, 
turns over stalls and seats, lashes the sacrilegious 
hucksters with a scourge of righteous anger and drives 
them from the holy area. 

“Tt is written,’ he told them, ‘my house shall be a 
house of prayer, but you have made it a den of rob- 


bers.’ ” 
Act II: THE PASSOVER 


Scene I. The sinister element in the drama develops 
with the visit of Judas to the chief priests in order to 
bargain and haggle with them for the betrayal of 


114 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


his Lord and leader. Some have tried to excuse Judas 
on the ground that he was only seeking to hurry on 
events which he thought inevitable, to force his Mas- 
ter to grasp the sword and bring on the happy dénoue- 
ment. One cannot read the gospels, however, with 
unbiased mind, without gaining the impression that 
the narrators believed Judas to be actuated only by the 
most sordid, selfish, and depraved motives. Undoubt- 
edly he is the Jago, the Benedict Arnold of the piece. 
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper gives 
the right caste to the weazened countenance of the 
betrayer. He is altogether a thief. 

Scene II. This scene adds sunlight and homely 
beauty. Jesus sends two of his disciples—probably 
Peter and John—into the city ahead of him to seek 
out and prepare a suitable place for the thirteen to 
eat the Passover feast. He tells them they will meet 
a man bearing a pitcher of water. Women in the East 
carry the water; almost never, men. The sight of a 
man bearing a water-jar is so unusual as scarcely to 
escape attention and remark. Something has gone 
wrong in the household to which this man belongs. 
Either a maidservant, ill or truant during this feast- 
holiday, or an over-plus of labor in hospitality, has 
forced this unusual task upon a sulky manservant. 
He goes out to do a menial task, and comes back with 
the emissaries of a King! 

Glad enough is the master of the house to welcome 
Peter and John. His guest-room, large, furnished, 
ready for some distinguished visitor—merchant-prince 
from Alexandria, Smyrna, or Rome, or Rabbi from 
Damascus or Athens—had not yet been bespoken. 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 115 


The good man has heard of this brilliant young teacher 
from Galilee. Right glad is he of the honor of enter- 
taining him. He shows Peter and John the roomy 
triclinium, or dining hall, the freshly sanded floor, 
clean and white, the long three-sided table, the couches 
and the cushions, the draperies over the windows 
fanned inward by the breeze. It will do. They make 
ready. 

Scene III. This is the Passover itself. That last 
night, that large upper room, the sputtering torches, 
the olive-oil lamps, the lamb and the unleavened bread, 
the night wind and the open windows, the words he 
utters, the washing of his disciples’ feet, the institution 
of the Lord’s Supper, or the Holy Communion, the 
prayer—how can all this be so put into words as the 
gospels themselves have burned it into our imagina- 
tions and memories? 


“Then he took a loaf and after thanking God he 
broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This means my 
body given up for your sake; do this in memory of 
me.’ So too he gave them the cup after supper, say- 
ing, “This cup means the new covenant ratified by my 
blood shed for your sake. But the hand of my be- 
trayer is on the table beside me! The Son of man 
moves to his end indeed as it has been decreed, but 
woe to the man by whom he is betrayed!’ And they 
began to discuss among themselves which of them 
could possibly be going to do such a thing.” 


Scene IV. Swiftly follow the events of that night, 
the singing of the midnight song in the Upper Room; 


116 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


the departure for the Brook Kedron and the olive- 
garden of Gethsemane; the prayer of Jesus, alone 
among the stones and the trees, while his disciples 
sleep; the coming of the betrayer with the Temple 
guard, and the dancing lights; the vicious kiss of be- 
trayal; the blow from Simon Peter with the sword; 
the quick healing of the wounded man, Malchus, by 
the Saviour; the overpowering presence of Christ be- 
fore whom the guards fall back to the ground. An 
American poet, Sidney Lanier, sings a plaintive song, 
like that of a flute, about the garden scene: 


A BALLAD OF TREES AND THE MASTER 


“Into the woods my Master went, 

Clean forspent, forspent. 

Into the woods my Master came, 
Forspent with love and shame. 

But the olives they were not blind to Him, 
The little gray leaves were kind to Him: 
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him 
When into the woods He came. 


“Out of the woods my Master went, 
And He was well content. 
Out of the woods my Master came, 
Content with death and shame. 
When Death and Shame would woo Him last, 
From under the trees they drew Him last; 
’Twas on a tree they slew Him—last, 
When out of the woods He came.” 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 117 


It is difficult to choose from the four gospels the 
one that contains the most tragic beauty; but Mat- 
thew’s account is here selected (Matthew XXVI). 
The reader may find the other accounts near the close 
of each gospel: 


“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Geth- 
semane, and he told the disciples, ‘Sit here till I go 
over there and pray.’ But he took Peter and the 
two sons of Zebedaeus along with him; and when he 
began to feel distressed and agitated, he said to them, 
“My heart is sad, sad even to death; stay here and 
watch with me.’ Then he went forward a little and 
fell on his face praying, ‘My father, if it is possible, 
let this cup pass me. Yet, not what I will but what 
thou wilt.’ Then he went to the disciples and found 
them asleep; and he said to Peter, ‘So the three of 
you could not watch with me for a single hour? 
Watch and pray, all of you, so that you may not slip 
into temptation. The spirit is eager but the flesh is 
weak.’ Again he went away for the second time and 
prayed, ‘My Father, if this cup cannot pass unless I 
drink it, thy will be done.’ And when he returned 
he found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy. 
So he left them and went back for the third time, 
praying in the same words as before. Then he went 
to the disciples and said to them, ‘Still asleep? still 
resting? The hour is near, the Son of man is be- 
trayed into the hands of sinners.’ ”’ 


Chapter XIII 
THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 
Acts III and IV 


Act III, Scenes I-III. There were three trials of 
‘Christ, all of which took place in the darkness of the 
night. The first of these was before Annas and 
Caiaphas, the High Priests, no doubt in the hall where 
the Great Sanhedrin held its sessions, called the Cham- 
ber of Hewn Stone. It was a somber and forbidding 
place, fit setting for the travesty upon justice which 
here occurred. The serene silence of Jesus in the face 
of his accusers, the manly refusal to answer all accu- 
sations, his evident determination not to enter upon a 
defense that he knew to be utterly useless—all betoken, 
not the wan, weak figure too often imagined of him 
but a heroic, althletic, strong young man of complete 
control. Without, in the courtyard, Peter, the leader 
of the twelve, denies all knowledge of his Master, 
with curses. 

Next Jesus is taken to Pilate, who for reasons of 
expediency sends him to the reigning Herod, Antipas, 
the black-browed and incestuous slayer of the Baptist. 
Herod had had enough of prophet’s blood. Remorse 
for the crime he had done at the behest of the dancing 
girl had long been gnawing at his heart. He dis- 
claimed jurisdiction. 


The blood-thirsty mob, afraid to proceed to ex- 
118 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 119 


tremities without some semblance of judicial sanction, 
next drag their victim back to the judgment hall of 
the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate. Here is a 
great scene in the supreme tragedy; next to the cruci- 
fixion itself, it is the greatest scene in the drama. 
Artists have recognized it as such and have seized 
upon it as the subject for pictures that have become 
favorites throughout the Christian world. Munkacsy 
never did anything finer than his Christ before 
Pilate. 

One can imagine the Roman official, dragged from 
his sleep, the stubble of grizzled beard upon his face, 
the close-cropped hair, the square determined chin, 
the testy humor. One is sorry for Pilate, who cares 
nothing about the fanatical squabbles of this strange 
religion. His business only to keep the peace and 
maintain the Law! Yet evidently he quickly falls 
under the spell of this vigorous and charming young 
rabbi, so serene and so calm. Pilate twists and squirms 
in the embarrassment to which his official duty has 
subjected him; he offers a substitute, Bar-Abbas, the 
highwayman; he calls for a basin and washes his 
hands; and finally, after twice privately examining the 
prisoner and openly declaring that he finds no fault 
in him, he gives him over to be executed. 

Weakness, vacillation, confession of injustice? All 
of that; but, from the standpoint of a ruthless Roman 
administrator, justifiable, indeed, inevitable. Not even 
Hamlet better portrays the indecision of a distressed 
mind refusing to take a vigorous stand. John in 
the nineteenth chapter sets forth, with simple restraint, 
the pitiful vacillation: 


120 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“Now when Pilate heard that, he was still more 
afraid; he went inside the praetorium again and asked 
Jesus, ‘Where do you come from? Jesus made no 
reply. Then Pilate said, “You will not speak to me? 
Do you not know it is in my power to release you 
or to crucify you?’ Jesus answered, ‘You would have 
no power over me, unless it had been granted you 
from above. So you are less guilty than he who 
betrayed me to you.’ This made Pilate anxious to 
release him, but the Jews yelled, ‘If you release him, 
you are no friend of Caesar’s! Any one who makes 
himself a king is against Caesar!’ On hearing this, 
Pilate brought Jesus out and seated him on the tri- 
bunal at a spot called the ‘mosaic pavement’—the He- 
brew name is Gabbatha (it was the day of Prepara- 
tion for the passover, about noon). ‘There is your 
king!’ he said to the Jews. Then they yelled, “Off 
with him! Off with him! Crucify him! ‘Crucify 
your king?’ said Pilate. The high priests retorted, 
‘We have no king but Caesar!’ Then Pilate handed 
him over to them to be crucified.”’ 


ScENE IV: THE CRUCIFIXION 


The climax of the world-tragedy begins in the outer 
court of the Governor’s palace. The scourging, with 
the heavy Roman scourge, leather-thongs strung with 
metal slugs, is a piece of barbarity to satisfy hate. 
The athletic young figure is soon changed to a weak 
and blood-soaked wreck. The humiliations, the mock- 
eries, the tortures, are almost too painful for the reader 
to bear, even as told in the restrained and unimpas- 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 121 


sioned language of the gospels. How great is their 
reserve can only be appreciated by one who tries even 
now coolly to write the story. How lofty is their 
art can only be discerned by reading their narratives 
over with the difficulties of measured portrayal in 
mind. 

The cross, ready prepared, is laid upon his bowed 
shoulders ; and to-day in Jerusalem the course they took 
with him is marked out by the stations, or resting- 
places, of the cross, along the Via Dolorosa, the Way 
of Sorrow, where he paused, or fainted. Finally a 
stranger, looking on, is forced to carry the cross for 
the fainting victim, and for this service has attained 
immortality—Simon of Cyrene. 

They nailed him to the cross on the top of a hill 
outside the gates, called Golgotha, the place of a skull. 
On the north side of Jerusalem, just outside the Da- 
mascus gate, one may stand to-day and gaze upon a 
dome-shaped hill, with two caverns in the precipitous 
side nearest to the city, and imagine he is looking 
into a fleshless face. It is Gordon’s Calvary. It is 
the place which the Englishman, Chinese Gordon, the 
Christian general, with a keen intuition, first pointed 
out to the world as the probable place of the crucifixion. 
Strange how so many centuries, even of crusaders, 
passed under it, without discerning the possibilities. 
Now perhaps the preponderance of opinion is favor- 
able to General Gordon’s surmise. Underneath that 
cliff is a garden, and in it, a tomb, hollowed out of 
the rock, with a huge round stone, resting in a groove, 
in such manner that it can be rolled into place to close 
the cavern. 


122 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


No other words should be used to describe the 
supreme tragedy except the simple and great words 
of the gospels themselves. Says Matthew: 


“Then they crucified him, distributed his clothes 
among them by drawing lots, and sat down there to 
keep watch over him. They also put over his head 
his charge in writing, 


THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF 
THE JEWS 


“Two robbers were also crucified with him at that 
time, one on the right hand and one on the left. Those 
who passed by scoffed at him, nodding at him in de- 
rision and calling, ‘You were to destroy the temple 
and build it in three days! Save yourself, if you are 
God’s Son! Come down from the cross!’ So, too, 
the high priests made fun of him with the scribes 
and the elders of the people. “He saved others,’ they 
said, ‘but he cannot save himself! He the “King of 
Israel”! Let him come down now from the cross; 
then we will believe in him! His trust is in God? 
Let God deliver him now tf he cares for him! He 
said he was the Son of God!’ The robbers who were 
crucified with him also denounced him in the same 
way. 

“Now from twelve o'clock to three o’clock darkness 
covered all the land, and about three o’clock Jesus gave 
a loud cry, ‘Eli, eli, lema sabachtham’ (that is, ‘My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) On 
hearing this some of the bystanders said, ‘He is calling 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 123 


for Elijah.’ One of them ran off at once and took 
a sponge, which he soaked in vinegar and put on the 
end of a stick to give him a drink. But the others 
said, ‘Stop, let us see if Elijah does come to save 
him! (Seizing a lance, another pricked his side, and 
out came water and blood.) Jesus again uttered a 
loud scream and gave up his spirit.” 


ACTA “ADE RSDEAT EH 


It is the province of the fourth act, always, to bring 
the audience gradually down from the high altitudes 
and the tension of the great third act to a calmer 
level. In this sense, then, the fourth act furnishes the 
anticlimax. The events narrated as following the 
crucifixion are admirably adapted to this purpose. 
There is the three days’ suspense during which Jesus 
lies in the tomb; then comes the resurrection, with 
the Easter passages about his meetings with the 
women, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” and 
with his disciples, Peter and John; the relief to tense 
nerves, the sigh of mingled astonishment and satisfac- 
tion over the dénouement which, after all, is a happy 
one for all the world. 

What happened after the burial of Jesus is a mys- 
tery and no doubt will ever remain a mystery; but 
mystery is an essential element in religion. That his 
disciples were firmly convinced he arose from the dead, 
and in some form appeared to them, there can be no 
shadow of doubt. Like Paul we cannot say with what 
body he came. Something happened, something 
strange and startling that proved to his followers he 


124 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


was not dead. One cannot read these post-resurrec- 
tion accounts without a sense that the writers are 
sincere and that they accomplish an impression not 
to be accomplished easily with purely fictitious ma- 
terials, an impression of verisimilitude. 

What concerns us most of all is the fact that he is 
not now dead, that he is significantly alive in our age, 
and that he has been for all the centuries since his 
crucifixion. There are many great souls of the past 
who still live in their influence upon our time; but there 
are none so keenly alive as Jesus. No one sensitive 
to the signs of our time can fail to perceive this truth. 
This, then, is the vital truth which, so far as we are 
concerned, enters into the situation. 

There are several scenes in this fourth act. The 
play is too monumental for us to bring all of them 
here before our eyes. We can only select certain ones. 
There is first the scene at the base of Gordon’s Cal- 
vary, in the garden, at the empty tomb. The women 
came breathlessly through the darkest hour just be- 
fore the dawn, bearing their spices and myrrh with 
which to anoint his body, anxious about the rolling 
away of the huge stone from before the opening of 
the tomb. The words hold for us centuries of Easter 
association: 


“At the close of the sabbath, as the first day of the 
week was dawning, Mary of Magdala and the other 
Mary went to look at the tomb. But a great earthquake 
took place, an angel of the Lord came down from 
heaven and went and rolled away the boulder and sat 
on it. His appearance was like lightning and his 


THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 125 


raiment white as snow. For fear of him the sentries 
shook and became like dead men; but the angel ad- 
dressed the women, saying, ‘Have no fear; I know you 
are looking for the crucified Jesus. He is not here, he 
has risen, as he told you he would. See, here is the 
place where he (the Lord) lay. Now be quick and 
go to his disciples, tell them he has risen from the 
dead and that “he precedes you to Galilee; you shall 
see him there.” That is my message for you.’ Then 
they ran quickly from the tomb in fear and great 
joy, to announce the news to his disciples.” 


Then follow scenes in Jerusalem, and in Galilee, 
scenes in which the chief figure is now Thomas, the 
doubter, now Peter, the denier. There is the scene 
of the ascension narrated in the first chapter of Acts 
of the Apostles, in which, upon the summit of the 
Hill of Olives, he takes last leave of his followers, 
declaring that they shall be his messengers to all the 
earth. But there is no scene of more quiet and pas- 
toral beauty among them than the walk to Emmaus. 
Even now the walk to the village called “Emwas” is 
one of the most attractive in the environs of Jerusa- 
lem. One of these two disciples was Clopas. Who 
was the other we can only conjecture. Two of his 
intimates walk toward the village of Emmaus, aim- 
lessly perhaps, certainly with sadness, when a stranger 
joins them; they tell him of their disappointment about 
the Jesus whom they had hoped to be the Messiah. 
He chides them for lack of faith in the scriptures and 
is about to pass on. Luke tells the story: 


126 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“Now they approached the village to which they 
were going. He pretended to be going further on, 
but they pressed him, saying, “Stay with us, for it 
is getting towards evening and the day has now de- 
clined.’ So he went in to stay with them. And as 
he lay at table with them he took the loaf, blessed it, 
broke it and handed it to them. Then their eyes were 
opened and they recognised him, but he vanished from 
their sight. And they said to one another, “Did not 
our hearts glow within us when he was talking to us 
on the road, opening up the scriptures for us?’”’ 


Thus closes the tragedy; and so ends the story of 
the life of Christ. Beginning quietly, it grows in ex- 
citement and storm and ends in peace. The effects 
of this story upon the history of the world no one 
can measure. Those effects seem to be increasing all 
the time. We could better afford to lose all other 
literature than these four gospels. 


Book Two: THE CHURCH IN THE ACTS 





Book Two: THE CHURCH IN 
THE ACTS 


Chapter XIV 
THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF THE CHURCH 


It is the cultivated and skillful writer, Luke, the 
physician, who gives us this book——-The Acts—and the 
third gospel. Both are dedicated to a friend, or to 
a personification, Theophilus, whose name means, 
“Lover of God.” If one glances at the opening of 
the Gospel of Luke and then reads the dedication of 
The Acts, he cannot fail to discern the similarity in 
style. Here is the beginning of The Acts: 


“In my former volume, Theophilus, I treated all 
that Jesus began by doing and teaching down to the 
day when, after issuing his orders by the holy Spirit 
to the disciples whom he had chosen, he was taken 
up to heaven. After his sufferings he had shown them 
that he was alive by a number of proofs, revealing him- 
self to them for forty days and discussing the affairs 
of God’s Realm.” 


Beginning where his gospel leaves off, at the resur- 
rection, with chaos among the Christians, and an 
unformed church, St. Luke, in this second book, sets 


himself the task of telling what the twelve did, and 
129 


130 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


those who worked with them, for spreading the new- 
found faith all over the Roman world. Starting at 
Jerusalem, advancing through Syria and Asia Minor, 
then into Greece, and finally on to Rome, the story 
marches with definite purpose, dignity, and unity. As 
soon as the task is ended and the gospel, in the keep- 
ing of St. Paul, arrives at Rome, the narrator ceases. 
Tempting as it must have been to detail all that hap- 
pened to the Apostle to the Gentiles in the imperial 
city, including his tfials, his appearances before Caesar, 
his condemnation, his martyrdom, Luke has nothing to 
say of all these dramatic events, to which he no doubt 
was an eye-witness. His self-restraint is artistic and 
convincing. Not every writer knows when to cease. 
St. Luke is a model for newspaper reporters and all 
writers of condensed narrative. 

The keynote to the book is contained in the inter- 
view between Jesus and the eleven apostles in the 
first chapter, immediately preceding the ascension. 
Without delay, the skillful narrator begins with the 
assembling of the scattered and timorous disciples on 
the day of Pentecost, sets forth the enduement with 
a new and powerful spirit, and their immediate proc- 
lamation of their new faith in many tongues. Here, 
in the second chapter of Acts, is a multicolored picture 
of a throng from all over the world, eager for the 
new story. If many of the verses of Homer are en- 
riched by catalogues of sonorous names, not less so 
is the narrative of the dwellers in far lands come home 
to Jerusalem. 

The address which Simon Peter gave upon this occa- 
sion must be reserved for comment until a later chap- 


BIRTH AND INFANCY OF THE CHURCH 131 


ter, but the effect of it, and the beautiful community 
life of the nucleus of the church is apparent. 


“The believers all kept together; they shared all 
they had with one another, they would sell their pos- 
sessions and goods and distribute the proceeds among 
all, as any one might be in need. Day after day they 
resorted with one accord to the temple and broke bread 
together in their own homes; they ate with a glad and 
simple heart, praising God and looked on with favour 
by all the people. Meantime the Lord added the saved 
daily to their number.” | 


The idyll, however, quickly gives place to the trag- 
edy; for after the choice of the first deacons, or ad- 
ministrators of the business affairs of the beloved com- 
munity, there follows hard the martyrdom of one of 
the most charming of them, Stephen. 

This first martyr, Stephen, was probably a native 
of Cilicia, that province in Asia Minor from which 
Paul, the apostle, came. Not unlikely, indeed, Stephen 
lived in Tarsus, on the Cydnus river, studied in the 
far-famed university there, obtained something of the 
Greek view of life and even, perhaps, some proficiency 
in the Greek games. He and Paul may have met, in 
those old days, when they were boys, and may have 
come to Jerusalem together to sit at the feet of Jewish 
rabbis. We first see St. Paul at the stoning of Stephen, 
when those who did the bloody work laid their gar- 
ments down at the feet of the “young man named 
Saul.” That martyrdom, and others which he wit- 
nessed, undoubtedly had a powerful effect upon the 


1382 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


mind of Saul, and formed a psychological preparation 
for his own conversion. 

Stephen, arraigned before the Sanhedrin, in the som- 
ber “Chamber of Hewn Stone,” in the Temple, shows 
himself an orator of no mean gifts, a master of in- 
vective, as he hurls defiance in the teeth of his accusers. 
Although he follows the favorite Hebrew methods of 
appeal to Hebrew history, nevertheless he employs cer- 
tain Greek turns of rhetoric which bear out our con- 
jecture that in his.far away Cilician boyhood home, 
he may have had contact with Greek culture. At all 
events, his daring, and his accusing words, in the 
presence of that august assembly of the elders of his 
people, are dramatic and moving. These words seal 
his doom. He is led forth beyond the gates and stoned, 
probably at the foot of that very hill which bore the 
cross of the Lord in whose behalf he played so brave 
a part. 

The blood of the martyrs, however, is always the 
seed of the church. The scattering of the disciples 
by persecution is the scattering of that seed. Every- 
where they went, they preached. A typical story, and 
one of rare charm, is that of Philip the Evangelist, in 
the eighth chapter: 


“But an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up 
and go south, along the road from Jerusalem to Gaza’ 
(the desert-route). So he got up and went on his 
way. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a high 
official of Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians (he 
was her chief treasurer), who had come to Jerusalem 
for worship and was on his way home. He was sitting 


BIRTH AND INFANCY OF THE CHURCH 133 


in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit 
said to Philip, ‘Go up and join that chariot.’ When 
Philip ran up, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. 
‘Do you really understand what you are reading?’ he 
asked. “Why, how can I possibly understand it,’ said 
the eunuch, ‘unless some one puts me on the right 
track?’ And he begged Philip to get up and sit beside 
him. Now the passage of scripture which he was 
reading was as follows:— 


““he was led like a sheep to be slaughtered, 
and as a lamb is dumb before the shearer, 
so he opens not his lips. 
By humbling himself he had his doom removed. 
Who can tell his family? 
For his life is cut off from the earth.’ 


“So the eunuch said to Philip, ‘Pray, who is the 
prophet speaking about? Is it himself or some one 
else?’ Then Philip opened his lips, and starting from 
this scripture preached the gospel of Jesus to him. 
As they travelled on, they came to some water, and 
the eunuch said, ‘Here is water! What is to prevent 
me being baptized?’ So he ordered the chariot to stop. 
Both of them stepped into the water, and Philip bap- 
tized the eunuch. When they came up from the water, 
the Spirit of the Lord caught Philip away, and the 
eunuch lost sight of him. He went on his way re- 
joicing, while Philip found himself at Azotus, where 
he passed on, preaching the gospel in every town, till 
he reached Caesarea.” 


Chapter XV 
DAWNING SENSE OF UNIVERSALITY 


A signal example of the way in which persecution 
reacts in favor of a good cause is found in the re- 
markable conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who appears 
first for a moment in the story at the stoning of 
Stephen. From the time he enters the narrative he 
carries most of the burden of progress across con- 
tinents, bearing to the Gentiles the gospel message, 
until he brings it to Rome. 

The complete change of mind on the part of Saul 
of Tarsus cannot have been instantaneous. One who 
persecutes a new faith, as he did, does not change 
over night into an advocate. It is psychologically im- 
possible. Saul had seen the heroic deaths of many 
Christians. A man of judicial temperament, a lawyer, 
and, more important still, a large-minded cosmopoli- 
tan, he could not look unmoved upon the serene devo- 
tion with which these men and women died. He must 
have pondered these things whenever he got time to 
meditate. So furiously active was he, however, that 
he had little opportunity to think, until, on the blood- 
thirsty mission to Damascus, he had to ride long 
hours across the desert in the bright sunlight. The 
effect upon both his physical and spiritual vision then 
becomes understandable. Both kinds of eyes were 


opened, after blinding light. He tells the story him- 
134 


DAWNING SENSE OF UNIVERSALITY 135 


self, in true oriental fashion, in his address before 
Agrippa. 

Simon Peter, too, opened his own eyes to the mis- 
sion of the new religion to Gentiles as well as Jews, 
only after a vision. Indeed he never fully grasped 
the world-wide view. Paul even opposes certain atti- 
tudes and actions of Peter, which evince the spirit 
of a narrow nationalism; and this clash between the 
world view and the Hebrew view is felt throughout 
the Acts, not only, but also all the rest of the New 
Testament. St. Paul fought a great fight in behalf 
of internationalism for the gospel. From the time 
of his conversion Christianity becomes a world re- 
ligion. 

Now the capital of Christendom may be said actu- 
ally to shift from Jerusalem to Antioch of Syria, 
Antioch was the second city of the Roman Empire, 
beautiful, rich, powerful. Here was an amphitheater, 
almost equal to the Colosseum, here the marble “Way” 
of Herod, here the first lighted streets in the world, 
here a garden of greenery and fruitfulness watered 
by the clear, cold Orontes river. At the persecution 
following the stoning of Stephen, certain evangelists 
came to Antioch and made many converts. 

“Tt was at Antioch too that the disciples were origi- 
nally called ‘Christians.’ ”’ 

Antioch becomes the headquarters of Saul, soon to 
be called Paul, for his journeys into the west. Once, 
twice, thrice, perhaps a fourth time, he covers the 
eastern half of the world from Syria to the Aegean, 
taking months and years for his long progresses, and 


136 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


for his patient planting of churches. The beginning 
of all this effort is set forth in chapter thirteen: 


“Now in the local church at Antioch there were 
prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Symeon (called 
Niger) and Lucius the Cyrenian, besides Manaen (a 
foster-brother of Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. As 
they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the holy 
Spirit said, ‘Come! set me apart Barnabas and Saul 
for the work to which I have called them.’ Then 
after fasting and praying they laid their hands on 
them and let them go. 

“Sent out thus by the holy Spirit, they went down 
to Seleucia and from there they sailed to Cyprus. On 
reaching Salamis they proclaimed the word of God 
in the Jewish synagogues, with John as their assistant.” 


The John here referred to is John Mark, the author 
of the second Gospel. 

They encountered many hardships and many strange 
experiences. They met the heathen world and all its 
old picturesque customs and prejudices in Asia Minor, 
the most historic peninsula in the world, where old 
Troy lies in ruins far beneath the soil. At Lystra oc- 
curred an episode, diverting and striking, which pic- 
tures the clash of old systems with the new: 


“Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, 
since he was the chief spokesman. Indeed the priest 
of the temple of Zeus in front of the town brought 
oxen and garlands to the gates, intending to offer 
sacrifice along with the crowds. But when the apos- 


————e rt 


DAWNING SENSE OF UNIVERSALITY 187 


tles, Paul and Barnabas, heard this they rent their 
clothes and sprang out among the crowd, shouting, 
“Men, what is this you are doing? We are but human, 
with natures like your own! The gospel we are preach- 
ing to you is to turn from such futile ways to the 
living God who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, 
and all that in them is. In bygone ages he allowed 
all nations to go their own ways, though as the bounti- 
ful Giver he did not leave himself without a witness, 
giving you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, giv- 
ing you food and joy to your heart’s content.’ Even 
by saying this it was all they could do to keep the 
crowds from sacrificing to them.” 


The fifteenth chapter describes how, on returning 
from his missionary journey to Jerusalem, Paul makes 
final adjustment with the other apostles, regarding 
the status of converts from the Roman world. Then 
Paul sets out again to carry the standard of empire 
farther toward the setting sun. Luke now uses the 
first personal pronoun “‘we,” indicating his own pres- 
ence with the party. Paul comes to the shores of the 
Aegean and crosses into Europe. So skillful is the 
narration and so beautiful the chime of the ancient 
names that this log-book of a journey becomes a pleas- 
ing piece of literature. Great, enthusiastic souls, like 
Paul, are likely to look upon the processes of their 
minds as “‘visions” and “calls.” The story loses on 
this account none of its charm: 


“A vision appeared to Paul by night, the vision of 
a Macedonian standing and appealing to him with 


1388 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


the words, ‘Cross to Macedonia and help us.’ As soon 
as he saw the vision, we made efforts to start for 
Macedonia, inferring that God had called us to preach 
the gospel to them. Setting sail then from Troas 
we ran straight to Samothrace and on the following 
day to Neapolis. We then came to the Roman colony 
of Philippi, which is the foremost town of the district 
of Macedonia. In this town we spent some days. 
On the sabbath we went outside the gate to the bank 
of the river, where as usual there was a place of 
prayer; we sat down and talked to the women who 
had gathered. Among the listeners there was a woman 
called Lydia, a dealer in purple who belonged to the 
town of Thyatira. She reverenced God, and the Lord 
opened her heart to attend to what Paul said. When 
she was baptized, along with her household, she begged 
us, saying, “If you are convinced I am a believer in 
the Lord, come and stay at my house.’ She compelled 
us to come.” 


At Philippi, the last battlefield of Brutus and Cas- 
sius, Paul shows his qualities, singing in prison and 
the midnight, and then somewhat haughtily demand- 
ing, on account of his Roman citizenship, escort out 
of an unjust imprisonment. He converts his jailor, 
confounds the magistrates, and altogether shows him- 
self a vigorous man of the world as well as missioner. 
One thrills at his claim of Roman birth and his proud 
defiance of the rulers. 

The journeys and work of Paul are so full of 
moving incident as well as attractive character por- 
trayal, that it is difficult to make selection. Ephesus 


v 
j 


DAWNING SENSE OF UNIVERSALITY 189 


became the theater for much of his activity, and it is 
at Ephesus we first meet the striking Apollos, who 
afterward perhaps became the author of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. 

Ephesus is at the present time one of the most 
beautiful and interesting of ancient ruins. Lying ona 
wide plain sprinkled with myriads of crimson poppies, 
its columns and arches fallen, its mighty theaters and 
temples, among them the great temple of Diana, cov- 
ered with moss and vines, it is slowly crumbling back 
to the earth whence it came. One stands among those 
prostrate columns and entablatures and sees again the 
throngs that swirled and shouted, “Great is Diana of 
the Ephesians,’ and stoned the messenger of a new 
god. So vivid is the impression left by the literary 
physician, Luke, who saw it all, upon the minds of 
our own day nearly two thousand years after. 


Chapter XVI 
THE GOSPEL CARRIED TO ROME 


Most of St. Paul’s career as a traveler circles round 
the Aegean Sea. Asia Minor, Macedonia, Achaia, and 
the Greek Archipelago, the highly colored and storied 
lands of classic art and myth and epic, these he daily 
looked upon. 


“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! 
Where burning Sappho loved and sung, 

Where grew the arts of war and peace, 
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! 

Eternal summer gilds them yet; 

But all, except their sun, is set.” 


Many others besides Byron have loved these blue 
waters, these green islands, these happy shores, with 
their houses, white, blue, pink, clothed in green vines 
and purple bougainvillaea. St. Paul must have loved 
them. A certain sadness seems to have come over 
him as, for the last time, he sailed among them on 
his way up to Jerusalem. Somehow, he discerned that 
when he reached the Holy City, enmity against him 
would attain its climax; like his Master he would 
be taken and imprisoned. All the while he held in 
reserve his Roman citizenship, his right to appeal 


to Caesar, his certainty of being sent, should he so 
140 


THE GOSPEL CARRIED TO ROME 141 


choose, to plead his own case in the palace of the 
Emperors at Rome. 

Events hurry forward, therefore, toward the great 
end, the launching of the gospel at the Capitol itself, 
the lodging of it in the Palace of the Caesars. The 
narrative gathers speed as St. Paul turns his steps 
toward his inevitable arrest. He sails away toward 
Jerusalem, past the isles of Greece, past Chios, past 
Samos, past Smyrna, ill-fated Smyrna, rounding the 
headland, at the southwest angle of Asia Minor, and 
puts in at the seaport of Ephesus. From Miletus he 
sends to Ephesus for the elders of the church. He 
exhorts them concerning the care of his beloved 
churches, tells them plainly that he never expects to 
see them again, and they all bid him a final farewell. 
It is a touching scene! 


“With these words he knelt down and prayed beside 
them all. They all broke into loud lamentation and 
falling upon the neck of Paul kissed him fondly, sor- 
rowing chiefly because he told them they would never 
see his face again. Then they escorted him to the 
ship.” 


If Renan could call the gospel of Luke “the most 
beautiful book that ever was,” we are certainly safe 
in calling The Acts one of the swiftest and most vivid 
narratives ever written. We move, in thorough sym- 
pathy with Paul, rapidly to the coast of Syria, land 
and go up to Caesarea, visit the Christians there, meet 
Agabus the prophet, who binds the Apostle with Paul’s 
own girdle and predicts that so should the owner of 


142 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


this belt be bound at Jerusalem. Thence, “After these 
days we packed up and started for Jerusalem.” 
The uproar, upon the entrance of St. Paul within 
the walls, bursts instantly, as if a bomb had been ex- 
ploded in the city. This stormy petrel brings with 
him, into the already charged atmosphere, lightnings 
and clashing winds. The story speeds swiftly along: 


“The whole city was thrown into turmoil. The 
people rushed together, seized Paul and dragged him 
outside the temple; whereupon the doors were imme- 
diately shut. They were attempting to kill him, when 
word reached the commander of the garrison that the 
whole of Jerusalem was in confusion. Taking some 
soldiers and officers, he at once rushed down to them, 
and when they saw the commander and the soldiers 
they stopped beating Paul. Then the commander came 
up and seized him; he ordered him to be bound with 
a couple of chains, and asked ‘Who is he?’ and ‘What 
has he done?’ Some of the crowd roared one thing, 
some another, and as he could not learn the facts 
owing to the uproar, he ordered Paul to be taken to 
the barracks.” 


St. Paul asks permission to address the people from 
the stairs of the Castle of Antonia, which is readily 
granted. Choosing their own tongue, he captures their 
attention, in spite of all the tumult—no small ora- 
torical feat. They hear him with restraint until he 
mentions his mission to the Gentiles, then they howl 
him down. 

Brought before the Jewish assembly, the Great San- 


THE GOSPEL CARRIED TO ROME 143 


hedrin, in that same historic Chamber of Hewn Stone, 
he shows himself the man of the world, the adroit 
politician, and divides the assembly over an ancient 
controversy between Pharisees and Sadducees about 
the resurrection. The high priest, Ananias, commands 
the guard to strike him on the mouth; and Paul re- 
plies with spirit, “You whitewashed wall, God will 
strike you!” Then, on learning it was the high priest 
he addressed, he apologized. 

During a long imprisonment in Jerusalem and Caes- 
area, he makes a number of addresses before persons 
of importance, like Felix, Festus, and Agrippa, and 
finally stands on his rights as a Roman citizen,—of 
whom there were not many outside of the Eternal City 
itself, and these few held in high honor and clothed 
with special privileges—and appealed to Caesar. The 
moment is a dramatic one, in which he makes the ap- 
peal; and Luke tells it with dramatic brevity and 
force. Festus is now the Roman procurator, holding 
the position that once belonged to Pontius Pilate: 


“As Festus wanted to ingratiate himself with the 
Jews, he asked Paul, ‘Will you go up to Jerusalem 
and be tried there by me upon these charges?’ Paul 
said, ‘I am standing before Caesar’s tribunal; that is 
where I ought to be tried. I have done no wrong 
whatever to the Jews—you know that perfectly well. 
If | am a criminal, if I have done anything that de- 
serves death, I do not object to die; but if there is 
nothing in any of their charges against me, then no 
one can give me up to them. I appeal to Caesar!’ 
Then, after conferring with the council, Festus an- 


144 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


swered, ‘You have appealed to Caesar? Very well, 
you must go to Caesar.’ ” 


At last, therefore, St. Paul has his long-deferred 
wish fulfilled; he is in sight of his goal; he is destined 
for Rome. The journey thither is picturesque, varied, 
and told in a style of the best reporting. No more 
vivid, condensed narrative of shipwreck has ever been 
written than that in Acts twenty-seven; and Prof. 
William Ramsey believes that St. Luke, in this story, 
tells us more of the ships of the Mediterranean than 
any classic writer has done. 

The end of the journey brings the gospel to Rome. 
The great climax had appeared in the arrest in Jeru- 
salem, and the accomplished narrator ends his story 
quietly in Paul’s own hired house in Rome: 


“In this way we reached Rome. As the local 
brothers had heard about us, they came out to meet 
us as far as Appii Forum and Tres Tabernae, and 
when Paul saw them he thanked God and took cour- 
age. When we did reach Rome, Paul got permission 
to live by himself, with a soldier to guard him... . 
For two full years he remained in his private lodging, 
welcoming anyone who came to visit him; he preached 
the Reign of God and taught about the Lord Jesus 
Christ quite openly and unmolested.” 


Chapter XVII 
ORATORY IN THE EARLY CHURCH 


Examples of classic oratory have come down to us. 
Although many of them are stilted and artificial be- 
yond modern endurance, some possess power and 
beauty. The flaming addresses of the prophets of 
Israel, notably Isaiah, cast their glow across the cen- 
turies. The phillipics of Demosthenes bring back to 
our imaginations the Athenian popular assemblies, sit- 
ting forward in their marble seats to hang upon his 
words. The impassioned periods of Cicero delivered 
like thunder-bolts against Cataline, which shook the 
very Forum in Rome, every schoolboy reads. John 
Chrysostom, he of the golden mouth, speaks to those 
familiar with church literature in tones that chime 
down the centuries like bells. Among the Hebrews, 
public speech belonged largely to the prophets who 
threatened and thundered against desertion of Jehovah 
for the gods of surrounding nations. Not until The 
Acts records the speeches of the apostles, does a more 
modern note appear, with a very definite purpose of 
convincing and persuading. After all what is oratory 
except talk that leads people to do things? 

The author of The Acts, St. Luke, shows himself 
an excellent reporter of events concisely told, not only, 
but also of speeches. The addresses in The Acts, com- 


ing as they do out of stirring events, affecting old 
145 


146 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


passions and prejudices, carrying the light of a new 
religion, must have thrilled their hearers. If a great 
occasion, a great message, and a great man are neces- 
sary to make a great speech, all three elements are 
present in the oratory of The Acts. Simon Peter, the 
“Rock Apostle,” Stephen, the first martyr, St. Paul, 
the messenger to the Gentile world,—these are great 
men speaking; and they preached great sermons. St. 
Paul, especially, reputed to have been the greatest of 
all preachers, gives evidence of his qualities in the 
addresses recorded in The Acts. 

Public speech is a form of acting; and the best act- 
ing is an expression of personality. Only those who 
know how to “let go,” to be intensely and serenely 
themselves, can become great speakers. Those who 
consciously or unconsciously try to “act,” during public 
speech, defeat their own purpose, like players who 
overdo their part or miss its spirit. The power to be, 
while before an audience, one’s own individual self 
is rare. Although the result of long and painful train- 
ing, it is, like the art of poetry, first of all a gift. 
Many men would be interesting and charming if 
only they knew the secret of self-revelation. The 
speakers of The Acts quickly learned, by the stress 
of opposition, by enthusiastic absorption in the great 
new message, to fling all posing and pretense away, 
and to let their own selves shine. 

The first sermon in Christian history is that of 
Simon Peter on the day of Pentecost, recorded in the 
second chapter of The Acts. The leader of the twelve 
speaks to an audience of Jews. Taking his departure 
from their ancient story, performing what teachers 


ORATORY IN THE EARLY CHURCH 147 


now call the process of apperception, he lifts his hearers 
from the known to the unknown, from those things 
which from childhood their fathers and their syna- 
gogue schools taught them, to the new and strange 
story of the Christ. While doing so, he reveals the 
same old impetuous Peter who had gone to such ex- 
tremes of conduct during his two or three years of 
association with Jesus. We can almost see his fiery 
spirit luminous, his rugged face radiant, his gestures 
powerful, and hear his words pouring forth tempestu- 
ous as a rushing river. 

His peroration consists of a parallel between David 
and Christ, David who is dead and buried, and Christ, 
who though slain by wicked hands, is alive and work- 
ing in the world; and he concludes: 


“This Jesus God raised, as we can all bear witness. 
Uplifted then by God’s right hand, and receiving from 
the Father the long-promised holy Spirit, he has 
poured on us what you now see and hear. For it 
was not David who ascended to heaven; David says, 


“ “The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, 
till I make your enemies a footstool for your 
el 


So let all the house of Israel understand beyond a 
doubt that God has made him both Lord and Christ, 
this very Jesus whom you have crucified.” 


The sermon brought results, which after all is the 
true test of oratory. Three thousand at least were 


148. THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


convinced; for that many made open avowal of their 
belief, and were baptized. 

A different type of public address appears in the 
seventh of The Acts—Stephen’s defense before the 
Sanhedrin. The plan is similar, the review of Jewish 
history, the appeal to Jewish pride and patriotism, 
suddenly merging into the story of Jesus, the Christ. 
No doubt all these early preachers were deliberately 
trained in this general method of approach, and varied 
it only according to. their varied personalities. Indeed 
it is natural for accomplished speakers, in times of 
emergency, to base their addresses upon the national 
history and traditions of those whom they wish to 
convince and persuade. Considering that Stephen is 
on trial for his life before a hostile assembly, his 
speech is a model of skill and desperate courage. 

This Stephen, as we have already seen, is quite a 
different character from Simon Peter. He gives 
evidence of some rhetorical training, no doubt ob- 
tained in the Greek environment of his boyhood home 
in Cilicia, probably in the schools of public address 
connected with the University at Tarsus. This young 
cosmopolitan is none the less familiar with the telling 
passages in Hebrew annals and employs them. The 
most striking thing, however, in his defense is his 
gallant attack, in his closing words, upon the rock- 
bound conservatism of his hearers, the chief men in 
Jerusalem: 


“Stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart and ear, you 
are always resisting the holy Spirit! As with your 
fathers, so with you! Which of the prophets did your 


ORATORY IN THE EARLY CHURCH 149 


fathers fail to persecute? They killed those who an- 
nounced beforehand the coming of the Just One. And 
here you have betrayed him, murdered him!—you who 
got the Law that angels transmitted, and have not 
obeyed it!” 


The result was inevitable. Inflamed with anger, 
and perhaps distressed by uneasy consciences, they 
condemned him and stoned him. The defense would 
seem to have been a failure; yet no one can say what 
effect it and the death of the martyr may have had 
upon the man who later was to make converts by the 
thousand among the nations of the Roman world— 
Saul of Tarsus. No one can say when a speech is 
a success and when a failure. Lincoln thought his 
Gettysburg speech a failure. 

Some good examples of deliberative discourse ap- 
pear in the fifteenth chapter of The Acts. Here the 
apostles and other leaders of the church assembled 
to debate an important question of church policy. 
Should the Gentiles be compelled to become proselytes 
to Judaism, entering by the gate of circumcision, be- 
fore they were permitted to become Christians by the 
gate of baptism? It is a momentous decision; and 
no doubt the presence of Paul and Barnabas turned 
the scale in favor of liberty; so that it is safe to say 
that so far as human wisdom can perceive, it is due 
to Paul that Christianity is to-day a free, independent 
religion, instead of a sect of the Jews. 

This fifteenth of Acts has long been a battle-ground 
among New Testament scholars. The controversy 
here revealed between the conservative Jewish element 


150 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


and the progressive element at work in the Gentile 
world, between the faction represented by James, the 
Bishop of Jerusalem, on the one hand and by Paul on 
the other, certainly rent the early church. It is possible 
to press too far the matter of finding, in this schism, 
the key to all the writings of the New Testament; 
nevertheless the council held at Jerusalem, as described 
in this chapter, throws much light upon the atmosphere 
there prevailing. It throws light, also, upon the char- 
acter of James, his diplomacy, his dignity, his title of 
“The Just.” He is a church statesman, the first of 
that type, and his summing up of the situation gives 
evidence of that fact: 


“When they had finished speaking, James spoke. 
‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘listen to me. Symeon has ex- 
plained how it was God’s original concern to secure 
a People from among the Gentiles to bear his Name. 
This agrees with the words of the prophets; as it is 
written, 


“ “After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen 
tent, 
its ruins I will rebuild and erect it anew, 
that the rest of men may seek for the Lord, 
even all the Gentiles who are called by my name, 


saith the Lord, who makes this known from of old. 
Hence, in my opinion, we ought not to put fresh dif- 
ficulties in the way of those who are turning to God 
from among the Gentiles, but write them injunctions 
to abstain from whatever is contaminated by idols, 


ORATORY IN THE EARLY CHURCH 151 


from sexual vice, from the flesh of animals that have 
been strangled, and from tasting blood; for Moses 
has had his preachers from the earliest ages in every 
town, where he is read aloud in the synagogues every 
sabbath,’ ” 


Like all compromises, the decision of the assembly 
seems to have satisfied neither faction to the full; and 
we find St. Paul later ignoring the injunction about 
meat offered to idols, and advising his converts to eat 
what was set before them asking no questions. 

Concerning all the addresses reported in the New 
Testament, we must remember that we have only the 
skeletons, the outlines. The speeches themselves, no 
doubt, occupied many minutes, running even to an 
hour each, at times, while the reported résumé may be 
read in but a few minutes. What must it have been, 
therefore, to be present and listen to the whole of that 
fiery defense of Stephen before the Sanhedrin? 


Chapter XVIII 
THE GREAT PREACHING OF PAUL 


Paul, the apostle, is proverbially the prince of 
preachers. ‘To preach like Paul” is a phrase of ancient 
usage. Of all the addresses reported in The Acts, his 
are to the western reader the most eloquent, most 
striking, most convincing. His voice has so rever- 
berated through the centuries that the biggest of the 
bells of London is fitly called “The Great Paul.” 


AT MARS HILL 


To-day in Athens the traveler would as soon think 
of passing by the Acropolis as to fail to visit the 
Areopagus, or Mars Hill. It was here that Paul de- 
livered one of his most skillful and beautiful sermons, 
or addresses. Nothing remains of the ancient market- 
place where the Athenians gathered to hear or to tell 
some new strange thing, except the barren rocks on 
which, no doubt, once stood colonnades of graceful 
marble columns. But one’s imagination supplies the 
throngs, the parti-colored costumes, the shrewd, in- 
quisitive faces, the tense and breathless interest with 
which these intellectual leaders of mankind listened to 
the stranger telling of a new God. 

Paul is courteous, adroit, delicate, in his introduc- 


tion of his theme, and convincing in handling it. He 
152 


THE GREAT PREACHING OF PAUL 153 


begins with a recognition, flattering to his hearers, of 
their natural and cultivated religious bent, takes his 
point of departure from one of their own poets—the 
only quotation of the kind in the New Testament 
writings—and holds their attention enchained until his 
reference to the resurrection, a doctrine so repellent to 
them that with all his skill he cannot hold them longer. 


“So Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and 
said, ‘Men of Athens, I observe at every turn that 
you are a most religious people. Why, as I passed 
along and scanned your objects of worship, I actually 
came upon an altar with the inscription 


TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. 


Well, I proclaim to you what you worship in your 
ignorance. The God who made the world and all 
things in it, he, as Lord of heaven and earth, does 
not dwell in shrines that are made by human hands; 
he is not served by human hands as if he needed any- 
thing, for it is he who gives life and breath and all 
things to all men. All nations he has created from 
a common origin, to dwell all over the earth, fixing 
their allotted periods and the boundaries of their 
abodes, meaning them to seek for God on the chance 
of finding him in their groping for him. Though 
indeed he is close to each one of us, for it is in him 
that we live and move and exist—as some of your 
own poets have said, 


“We too belong to His race.” 


154 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Well, as the race of God, we ought not to imagine 
that the divine nature resembles gold or silver or stone, 
the product of human art and invention. Such ages 
of ignorance God overlooked, but he now charges men 
that they are all everywhere to repent, inasmuch as 
he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world 
justly by a man whom he has destined for this. And 
he has given proof of this to all by raising him from 
the dead.’ ” 


Recalling the fact-that we have here but a very brief 
digest of what must have been a half hour’s or an 
hour’s address, what an effect it nevertheless has upon 
the mind! One can see at once how adroit it is; but 
the reference to the resurrection, an idea especially 
repugnant to the Greek mind, to which St. Paul leads 
up so carefully, puts an end to the sermon. Most of 
the Greeks will not hear him further. 

There are those who speak of Paul’s effort in Athens 
as a failure. Possibly it was. How can one know, 
however, what is failure and what is success in the 
affairs of this complicated world? He made some 
converts, and although he soon departed from Athens, 
and, so far as we know, never resumed activity there, 
or founded a church there, still the Greek world, of 
which this fair city was the center and soul, was 
gradually permeated and dominated by the gospel Paul 
preached on Mars Hill. 


AT THE CASTLE OF ANTONIA 


A very different address, under very different aus- 
pices, in which the Apostle employs very different 


THE GREAT PREACHING OF PAUL 155 


tactics, is that made in Jerusalem at the time of his 
arrest. Cosmopolitan that he is, he employs the He- 
brew tongue as fluently as the Greek; and compre- 
hending various sorts of people as he does, he makes 
the approach to this Jewish mob in a manner no less 
adroit but far more direct than he had employed at 
Athens. He begins: 


““T am a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought 
up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel in 
all the strictness of our ancestral Law, ardent for God 
as you all are to-day. I persecuted this Way of re- 
ligion to the death, chaining and imprisoning both 
men and women,’ ” 


Then follows the first of several accounts which 
he gives of his sudden conversion on the road to 
Damascus. Paul seems unaware that there was any 
mental and spiritual preparation for this event in his 
career; but we are familiar now with many uncon- 
scious processes that go forward in our being, and 
can even discern, at this distance, some of those which 
took place in him. However that may be, it is in this 
case the word “Gentiles” that put an end to this ad- 
dress, even as it was the word “resurrection” that ter- 
minated the one to the Athenians. When he declared 
that God called him to carry his message far hence 
to the Gentiles, the religious intolerance of the Jews 
broke bounds and they rent garments, threw dust on 
their heads, and acted like whirling dervishes. 


156 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


BEFORE AGRIPPA 


Subsequently to this, Paul addressed the Jewish 
Council of Elders, the Great Sanhedrin, and made 
various defenses before Festus and before Felix, 
Roman representatives, all of them orations of skill 
and interest; but perhaps the best of them all, the most 
logical, broad-minded, and graceful, is the defense be- 
fore Herod Agrippa. He enters upon his discourse 
with a delicate compliment to that ruler, employs a 
quick nervous gesture to capture attention, and argues 
from Jewish prejudice and Jewish tradition, by way 
of his own personal experience, to the broad world- 
wide view of religion he had come to entertain. The 
beginning and the ending of this masterly address, 
from Acts twenty-six follows: 


“At this Paul stretched out his hand and began his 
defence. ‘I consider myself fortunate, king Agrippa, 
in being able to defend myself to-day before you 
against all that the Jews charge me with; for you are 
well acquainted with all Jewish customs and ques- 
tions. Pray listen to me then with patience. How I 
lived from my youth up among my own nation and 
at Jerusalem, all that early career of mine, is known 
to all the Jews. They know me of old. They know, 
if they chose to admit it, that as a Pharisee I lived 
by the principles of the strictest party in our religion. 
To-day I am standing my trial for hoping in the 
promise made by God to our fathers, a promise which 
our twelve tribes hope to gain by serving God earnestly 
both night and day. . . . To this day I have had the 


THE GREAT PREACHING OF PAUL 157 


help of God in standing, as I now do, to testify alike 
to low and high, never uttering a single syllable beyond 
what the prophets and Moses predicted was to take 
place. Why should you consider it incredible that God 
raises the dead, that the Christ is capable of suffering, 
and that he should be the first to rise from the dead 
and bring the message of light to the People and to 
the Gentiles’? When he brought this forward in his 
defence, Festus called out, ‘Paul, you are quite mad! 
Your great learning is driving you insane.’ ‘Your ex- 
cellency,’ said Paul to Festus, ‘I am not mad, I am 
speaking the sober truth. Why, the king is well aware 
of this! To the king I can speak without the slightest 
hesitation. I do not believe any of it has escaped his 
notice, for this was not done in a corner. King 
Agrippa, you believe the prophets? I know you do,’ 
‘At this rate,’ Agrippa remarked, ‘it won’t be long 
before you believe you have made a Christian of me!’ 
‘Long or short,’ said Paul, ‘I would to God that not 
only you but all my hearers to-day could be what I 
am—barring these chains!’ ” 


This address has lent itself many times to declama- 
tion by school and college boys, as well as by speakers 
of maturer years. A trained actor might speak it with 
even more efiect than Hamlet’s soliloquy or Mark 
Antony’s oration. 





Book THREE: PAUL AND HIS WORLD 
EVANGEL 





Book THREE: PAUL AND HIS 
WORLD EVANGEL 


Chapter XIX 
PAUL A WRITER OF LETTERS 


Paul was the father of Christian literature—the 
first writer we know anything about to set pen to 
paper, or stylus to papyrus, in behalf of the new re- 
ligion. When we think of the gospel of Matthew as 
the first book of the New Testament, we are thinking 
logically and not chronologically. The Thessalonian 
letters of St. Paul are the earliest Christian writings 
that have come down to us in their original form. 
The “logia,” or “oracles,” of Jesus may have been 
reduced to writing from memory by hearers or from 
short-hand notes—stenography existed among Greeks 
and Romans in that day—and even some of the inci- 
dents in his life may have been written down; but our 
best information is that the four gospels, in their 
yresent form, are later than most, if not all, of the 
ietters of St. Paul. He is the earliest of Christian 
writers. 

Moreover, he invented much of the phraseology and 
worked out most of the philosophy of Christianity, 
which has endured to this day. His words have em- 
bedded themselves in religious speech until they have 


become a part of us; and we utter them unthinkingly, 
161 


162 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


such as “Justification by faith,’ “The Lord’s Supper,” 
“Communion,” “In Christ,’ and the benedictions still 
used in public worship. These and a host of other 
phrases, which drop unconsciously and glibly from 
the tongues of Christians, are not only found for the 
first time in the writings of Paul, but were fashioned 
by him. 

At the same time, he developed a system of theology 
to fit under the new structure of the church. Jesus 
never devised a system. It is as if he had built a 
beautiful airy structure, poetic and true, but floating, 
as it were, until Paul dug down to the rock below, put 
in the undergirders, and laid the masonry. 

The mind of Paul, philosophic, scientific, whether 
by nature or training, insisted upon system, order; 
and he strove until he got it. Besides, the construc- 
tion of the churches rested upon him. He must lay 
the plans upon which orderly and progressive build- 
ing must be done; and every administrative faculty 
leaped into play. He shows rare versatility. 

All this, while he carries on the most laborious of 
lives. Fond of travel, perhaps, and urged by his 
mission, more likely, he hurries from city to city, land 
to land, continent to continent, over deserts, seas, or 
military roads, and at the same time does the greatest 
thinking of his age—perhaps it is safe to say the great- 
est religious thinking of any age. Other men have 
performed labors as Herculean as his; other mis- 
sionaries, like Xavier, Livingstone, and Judson, have 
shot their jagged journeys like lightning flashes from 
side to side of darkened peninsulas and continents; 
but where is there a David Livingstone or a Francis 


PAUL A WRITER OF LETTERS 163 


Xavier, who, along with these practical and wearing 
works, has at the same time sent forth, during journeys 
or between them, a systematized theology, clothed in 
a new set of enduring words? 

Of course the inspiration of God moves back of 
these achievements. It passes our thinking to declare 
just what this inspiration is, when and where and 
how it works. God inspires good men to good deeds, 
and great writers to great writings. God has always 
inspired and continues, let us hope, to inspire states- 
men, poets, thinkers. It would be sad to believe that 
God entered human hearts in one age and ceased to 
visit them in another. The inspiration of God is too 
deep and mysterious for us to define, describe, and 
tabulate. We cannot always say of it, lo here, and 
lo there; for, like the kingdom of God, it is among 
us, sometimes within us; and it is futile to disagree 
about it. Paul is inspired of God, nothing less. A 
genius—and inspired! 

The works of Paul consist of ten to thirteen letters 
to individuals and churches which, for the most part, 
he had founded. We cannot say definitely ten, be- 
cause there is fairly good authority for believing that 
he wrote all thirteen that bear his name; neither can 
we definitely declare for thirteen, because there is 
good evidence against two or three of the shorter 
letters. Nevertheless, it is conceded that even these 
contain much that is Pauline in thought and manner, 
even if not actually written in entirety by him. So, 
for the practical purpose of estimating his prose and 
poetry, we are safe in proceeding on the assumption 
that his works comprise the whole thirteen. 


164 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Paul probably wrote other letters that have not come 
down to us. We know he wrote a third one to the 
church at Corinth, which is now missing. He may 
well have written others, which are lost. We are 
fortunate indeed in possessing these thirteen. Here 
then is the material we are to estimate: First and 
Second Thessalonians, letters of the Advent, or sec- 
ond coming, written during the second missionary jour- 
ney about 52 A.D.; First and Second Corinthians, 
Galatians and Romans, which may be called the theo- 
logical epistles, written during the third missionary 
journey, about five years later than the first group, 
say, 56-57 A.D.; Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians 
and Philemon, letters exalting the person of the Christ, 
dating from the Roman imprisonment, another five 
years later, which is about 62-63 A.D.; and finally 
First and Second Timothy and Titus, the pastoral 
epistles, having to do with the care and oversight of 
the churches, written, perhaps during a second im- 
prisonment at Rome, about 65-67 A.D. 

The dates roughly correspond to the years of Paul’s 
age, since he probably was born about the same time 
as our Lord. His death must have fallen about 64 to 
67 A.D. as, according to tradition, he was beheaded in 
the reign of Nero. As an aid to memory, it may be 
observed that the groups are about five years apart. 

It interests one to note that his literary activity 
began after he had passed the half-century mark, so 
far as any work of his that has come down to us is 
concerned, and continued for some fourteen or fifteen 
years. It is, moreover, interesting that the largest 
part of the contents of our New Testament is made 


PAUL A WRITER OF LETTERS 165 


up of personal letters; and by far the largest part 
of these letters are by St. Paul. Struck off at white 
heat, dictated and often not even revised, emergency 
messages, they have assumed a place among the sacred 
books of our religion. 

Insignificant we should to-day consider those 
churches which Paul addressed. Not among the rich 
and powerful their people, but among the poor, the 
obscure, even the criminal and outcast elements of 
society. They resembled, these little knots of Chris- 
tians, nothing else in our day quite so much as the 
feeble little rescue missions in the slum sections of our 
great cities. To such assemblies as these, for the most 
part, Paul sends his hastily written messages. 

Just casual letters, these, written to meet an instant 
need, to encourage a battered and persecuted little band 
of Christians in the purlieus of some great city, or to 
set right the vagaries of thought of others, to com- 
pose differences and quarrels here, or to render affec- 
tionate thanks for some favor done there. Yet how 
long-lived and absorbing they have proved to centuries 
of time and millions of people. 

We have read the lives and letters of many men, 
from antiquity even to our own day. We love to 
ponder such letters, for they reveal so many things 
about the writer and his times. Very early in classical 
days the fashion of circulating such letters began; 
and even now the presses send out volumes of them. 
How well, in comparison, we could dispense with all 
the personal letters ever published rather than to give 
up, let us say, Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, to 
the Romans, to the Philippians. 


Chapter XX 
WHAT SHAPED# PAUL SoS PYRE 


St. Paul, like the other New Testament writers, 
wrote in Greek. Little, however, is lost in flavor in 
the passing over into English, because of the skill and 
care and even genius of our translators. Nevertheless 
something inevitably must be sacrificed if one confines 
himself exclusively to the English version. The Greek 
was peculiarly fit for Paul’s use. There are passages 
in which the ring of the original, its sensitiveness, del- 
icacy, and pliability are essential to the highest appre- 
ciation; but, after all, we have in our own tongue 
all the best of it. 

Fortunate, indeed, for Paul that Alexander had gone 
everywhere planting Greek colonies to spread the 
tongue which became all but universal. A tongue it 
was, of such flexibility, so adapted to convey the deli- 
cate shades of meaning contained in the spiritual think- 
ing of the Apostle and his new religion, so fitted to 
philosophical and theological discussion, as well as to 
exalted feeling and even rhapsody, as no other lan- 
guage has ever quite been. 

Fortunate, further, for the great Traveler and Mis- 
sionary that the Roman Eagles had gone everywhere, 
settling the lands to law and order, unrolling the wide 
white stone roads and guarding them, establishing sea 
routes and policing them, to render safe and rapid 


the progress of the new faith along the arteries of 
164 


WHAT SHAPED PAUL’S STYLE 167 


the world. It is trite to say, though we here need 
to remember it, that Rome conquered Greece and ruled 
it; and that Greece in turn conquered Rome and pre- 
scribed its thought and scholarship, as well as the lan- 
guage in which to clothe them. So Paul, seeing these 
things, could well speak of “the fulness of the times,” 
for the ushering in of his new gospel. Alexander was 
a sort of unconscious John the Baptist for the Apostle 
Paul; for, with the equally unwitting help of Rome, 
he had practically Grecianized the ancient world. 

Although Paul understood, as all rabbis and most 
Jews in general did, the Hebrew scriptures, it is from 
the Septuagint, or Greek version, that he most often 
quotes and with which he seems most closely familiar. 
Doubtless the long habit of using Greek had grown 
upon him; for he had been some fourteen years a 
Christian before he began to write. Furthermore it 
is practically always to people using the Greek tongue 
that he writes. One ought, therefore, to bear this 
all-important fact in mind in studying Paul’s style,— 
that these are Greek writings. 

Furthermore, Paul dictated his letters, another fact 
that bears much upon matters of style. With the ex- 
ception of the Galatian letter, which, through stress 
of emotion or for some other unexplained reason, 
he wrote with his own hand, as he himself declares, 
and with the exception of the final salutation and 
signature which he always appended to every letter 
as a sign of genuineness, his epistles are given by 
word of mouth to some ready writer. Why he adopted 
this method has caused much speculation; and varied 
are the conjectures to explain it. Possibly the busy 


168 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


life he led, the limitation of his time, the necessity 
of toiling with his own hands to support himself, 
forced him to dictate to a more facile amanuensis. 
Possibly his poor eyesight in advancing years—al- 
though it is not certain that his sight was defective 
—may have influenced him. When he wrote to the 
Galatians he apologized for his large handwriting, 
saying: “See what big letters I make when I write 
to you in my own hand!’—not “how long a letter.” 
This may have been from nearsightedness. So also 
may have been his failure to recognize the High Priest 
when Paul hotly turns on him in the council chamber 
at Jerusalem and cries: ‘““You whitewashed wall, God 
will strike you!” then apologizes in the next breath, 
saying: “I did not know he was high priest.” Possibly 
the solution may be found in the fact that Paul was 
a poor penman, and writing materials scarce, dear, and 
not to be wasted with large childish handwriting. 
Many a man before Paul and since was a poor 
penman. Some one has said good penmanship is in 
inverse ratio to greatness. We may picture St. Paul, 
in a brief breathing spell, between sessions of elders, 
or on the low stool of the tent-maker’s shop, his thin 
arms deep in the strong-smelling hair of the goats, 
or in camp by the wayside, under a torch flickering 
in the wind of the desert or the sea, pouring forth his 
thoughts—well considered thoughts—his admonitions, 
his exhortations, to his beloved children in the faith 
a hundred or a thousand miles away. Then, to guard 
against imposture, as attempts had been made to forge 
letters, “purporting to come from me” (II Thess. II: 
2) he takes the papyrus into his own hand, scrawls 


WHAT SHAPED PAUL’S STYLE 169 


a hasty personal word or two, perhaps a salutation 
or a benediction, and signs his name. 

In one instance, the Roman letter, the amanuensis 
naively inserts a paragraph in his own name, saying: 
“TI Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the 
Lord.” Immediately we begin to imagine the per- 
sonal characteristics of the scribe, Tertius, his eager- 
ness and his pardonable pride in his work, as well as 
the large charity and kindliness of St. Paul in per- 
mitting the pretty pomposity of the insertion. Thus 
is the name of Tertius rescued from oblivion and sent 
alive across two millenniums! 

Dictation affects style. Undoubtedly dictation ac- 
counts for many of St. Paul’s long and involved sen- 
tences, parentheses, circumlocutions, qualifying clauses. 
Several exegetes have wished that Paul had written 
his own letters all with his own hands, so they might 
the more easily fathom his meaning. A good instance 
of the broken style which flowed from dictation is 
found in the opening of the Galatian letter, which is 
affected also by intense feeling: 


“Paul an apostle—not appointed by men nor com- 
missioned by any man but by Jesus Christ and God 
the Father who raised him from the dead,—with all 
the brothers who are beside me, to the churches of 
Galatia; grace and peace to you from God our Father 
and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our 
sins to rescue us from the present evil world—by the 
will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for 
ever and ever: Amen. I am astonished you are hastily 
shifting like this, deserting Him who called you by 


170 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Christ’s grace and going over to another gospel. It 
simply means that certain individuals are unsettling 
you; they want to distort the gospel of Christ. Now 
even though it were myself or some angel from heaven, 
whoever preaches a gospel that contradicts the gospel 
I preached to you, God’s curse be on him! I have said 
it before and I now repeat it: whoever preaches a 
gospel to you that contradicts the gospel you have 
already received, God’s curse be on him! Now is that 
‘appealing to the interests of men’ or of God? Trying 
to ‘satisfy men’? Why, if I still tried to give satis- 
faction to human masters, I would be no servant of 
Christ.” 


Moreover, the dictation was evidently done rapidly, 
and the letters sent away with little or no revision. 
Paul begins a statement, then qualifies it so much that 
it becomes quite a different statement from that which 
he started to make. Thus in the first chapter of First 
Corinthians, with some intensity and even asperity, 
he cries: “I am thankful now that I baptized none of 
you, except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can 
say you were baptized in my name. (Well, I did 
baptize the household of Stephanas; but no one else, 
as far as I remember.)”’ He starts out declaring em- 
phatically that he baptized none, and when he finishes 
he is not sure, and neither are we, but that he may 
have baptized a dozen or so. Had he rewritten or 
carefully revised that letter, or had stationery not been 
too precious, he would probably have cast the sentence 
quite differently. 

Sometimes, therefore, Paul grows prolix, involved 


WHAT SHAPED PAUL’S STYLE 171 


and even tedious, in his desire for scrupulous accuracy. 
Many persons have proved poor story-tellers, halting 
and slow, on account of this very innate honesty. 
General Grant, they say, prosed along most drowsily, 
as a narrator, while he searched his memory for the 
minutest detail, as if he should say: “No, the canteen 
was not on the east side of the tent. I picked it up 
on the west. No, I believe it was at the rear. I 
am not quite sure. Anyway it is of no consequence. 
As I was about to say—” In his writings, however, 
in which Grant had time to revise and reshape and 
polish, he is admirably simple and lucid and direct 
—a model of style. So, doubtless, might Paul have 
been but for rapid dictation. A thing that is easily 
read is not often easily written. The easier the read- 
ing, the more laborious the writing. There are many 
sentences which prove that St. Paul rather lost his 
whereabouts, after starting, as other thoughts came 
crowding in. He found himself again, as he always 
does, and came out where he intended to, but only 
after considerable labor. 

Naturally it follows, both from the method of writ- 
ing and from the purpose of the writings, that the 
language of the Apostle is largely colloquial in char- 
acter. He writes as he would have talked, indeed as 
he did talk. Huis readers are his friends, his children 
in the faith, and he sees them before him, their familiar 
faces clouded or glowing according to whether his 
words contained reproof or praise. Consequently his 
writings sound often like speaking, preaching or con- 
versation. At other times, all the care and revision 
possible could not have improved the polished beauty 


172 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


of his periods. There are times when, although like 
Ruskin at the close of his chapters, Paul sings with 
a wrapt and exalted enthusiasm, nevertheless it would 
appear that each sentence had been chiseled and pol- 
ished to the last degree of refinement. If Webster 
worked for nineteen years on that one sentence in his 
great ‘““extempore” speech, “liberty and union, one and 
inseparable, now and forever,’ one would think that 
in the Arabian deserts, Paul, for fourteen years, may 
have hummed over -in the dusky, starlit nights the 
hymn to Charity, ending: “Thus “faith and hope and 
love last on, these three,’ but the greatest of all is 
love.”’ 

Ordinary literary standards therefore must be ap- 
plied with care and caution to much of the work of 
St. Paul. A great deal of it scarcely possesses style 
at all. Scholarship, too, may err, through failure to 
remember the purely epistolary, the dictated, character 
of the work. The genuineness of an epistle, for ex- 
ample, cannot justly be impeached because of the ap- 
pearance of new and strange words and phrases not 
found in other letters. Such words are frequent in 
the language of the markets, the streets, and the high- 
ways, which he employs. His is the common talk of 
common men, not the language of scientists, scholars, 
writers of treatises, and essayists. To a writer on 
systematic theology, the test of “words used only once” 
might fairly be applied, in searching for genuineness; 
but not to one whose informal letters are thrilling and 
throbbing with the electric touch of life. Circum- 
stances of time and place, or readers and writer, are 
too various. 


Chapter XXI 
PAUL’S PLAN OF AN EPISTLE 


Before attempting more minutely to analyze the 
style of the Apostle, it is worth while to consider the 
usual outline of a Pauline letter, which is somewhat 
as follows: 

First: there is the salutation from the writer to the 
readers. Following the usual custom in the corre- 
spondence of the day, St. Paul places the name of the 
writer at the beginning instead of at the end of his 
letter; but there is with him more than the conven- 
tional salutation. He improves the occasion for a 
human touch, which one can scarcely define, but which 
one writer possesses and another lacks. Sometimes 
his salutation breathes a sort of majesty, and one can 
almost see the grand old man as he makes his bow 
to the church or the person he is addressing. Here 
is his greeting to the Ephesians: 


“Paul, by the will of God an apostle of Jesus Christ, 
to the saints who are faithful in Jesus Christ: grace 


and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord 
Jesus Christ.” 


The current Greek inscription to a letter is, in Paul’s 
case, expanded into a sort of benediction. He gives 
his own name and, except in the case of the Thessa- 


lonian letters, his first ones, adds some title or qualify- 
173 


174 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


ing or explanatory word or phrase, as “Apostle,” or 
“Servant of Jesus Christ,’ usually with the purpose 
of affirming unmistakably his apostleship and equal 
dignity with the twelve. Sometimes he styles him- 
self the “Bond Servant of Jesus Christ,” or the “Pris- 
oner of Christ,’ sometimes only the “Servant of 
Christ.” In his only strictly private epistle, that to 
Philemon, he pathetically terms himself simply “a 
prisoner of Jesus Christ.” Here is a greeting full of 
majesty, to the Church at Corinth, at the beginning 
of his first letter: 


“Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by 
the will of God, with brother Sosthenes, to the church 
of God at Corinth, to those who are consecrated in 
Christ Jesus, called to be saints, as well as to all who, 
wherever they may be, invoke the name of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, their Lord no less than ours: grace and 
peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus 
Christ.” 


Second comes a Thanksgiving for the faith and 
endurance of his converts, for the grace of God and 
all that it has brought to the beloved people to whom 
he writes. He can usually find something to be glad 
about, to give thanks for. Sometimes he adds a 
prayer for the continued endurance of his people under 
stress of persecution, or for other things which he 
earnestly desires for them. One of the most touching 
of these is at the opening of Second Corinthians : 


“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Father of tender mercies and the God of 


PAUL’S PLAN OF AN EPISTLE 175 


all comfort, who comforts me in all my distress, so 
that I am able to comfort people who are in any 
distress by the comfort with which 1 myself am com- 
forted by God. For as the sufferings of Christ are 
abundant in my case, so my comfort is also abundant 
through Christ. If I am in distress, it is in the in- 
terests of your comfort and salvation; if | am com- 
forted, it is in the interests of your comfort, which is 
effective as it nerves you to endure the same sufferings 
as I suffer myself. Hence my hope for you is well- 
founded, since I know that as you share the suffer- 
ings you share the comfort also. 

“Now I would like you to know about the distress 
which befell me in Asia, brothers. I was crushed, 
crushed far more than I could stand, so much so that 
I despaired even of life; in fact I told myself it was 
the sentence of death. But that was to make me 
rely not on myself but on the God who raises the 
dead; he rescued me from so terrible a death, he 
rescues still, and I rely upon him for the hope that 
he will continue to rescue me. Let me have your co- 
operation in prayer, so that many a soul may render 
thanks to him on my behalf for the boon which many 
have been the means of him bestowing on myself.”’ 


So far as his letters addressed to churches are con- 
cerned, only in the Galatian letter is this Thanksgiving 
omitted. Here it is superseded by censure, denuncia- 
tion, anathema, upon those who had removed the fool- 
ish Galatians so soon from their faith. This letter 
is a warlike one, and Paul loses no time in forcing 
the fighting. In two personal letters,—the first to 


176 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Timothy, and the one to Titus,—the Thanksgiving 
is omitted, and the Apostle begins at once with eager 
exhortations to his son in the faith. The form of 
the Thanksgiving varies greatly. Now it is brief, now 
it is long, exhaustive, and deeply earnest. 

Third and Fourth are the two main portions of 
the letter—doctrinal and practical. Here St. Paul 
grapples with whatever difficulties he knows the church 
to be facing, advising means and measures, or offers 
whatever exhortation or encouragement is most 
needed. Sometimes before, sometimes after the prac- 
tical comes the doctrinal discussion, the elaboration 
of those great principles of systematic theology by 
which the church is guided to this day. Let us take 
an instance of each,—the doctrinal and the practical. 
In the eleventh of Romans, in which Paul is address- 
ing Gentile converts, is an excellent example of Paul’s 
theological manner, with one of his most characteristic 
and vivid images, that of the wild olive: 


“Tf the first handful of dough is consecrated, so 
is the rest of the lump; if the root is consecrated, so 
are the branches. Supposing some of the branches 
have been broken off, while you have been grafted 
in like a shoot of wild olive to share the rich growth 
of the olive-stem, do not pride yourself at the expense 
of these branches. Remember, in your pride, the stem 
supports you, not you the stem. You will say, ‘But 
branches were broken off to let me be grafted in!’ 
Granted. They were broken off—for their lack of 
faith, And you owe your position to your faith. 
You should feel awed instead of being uplifted. For 


PAUL’S PLAN OF AN EPISTLE 177 


if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not 
spare you either.” 


The twelfth of Romans, immediately following and 
clinching the argument, is practical; but for variety’s 
sake, let us take an extract from the fifth and sixth 
chapters of Galatians: 


“But the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, 
good temper, kindliness, generosity, fidelity, gentle- 
ness, self-control.” 


“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law 
of Christ.” 


These sections, doctrinal and practical, are not al- 
ways separated one from the other, but are sometimes 
intermingled. In occasional instances one or the other 
may be omitted; but in general both are present. 

Fifth come the specific exhortations and greetings 
to individuals fitted to the peculiar conditions of the 
particular church he is addressing. As he nears the 
end of an epistle, Paul always becomes increasingly 
conscious that he is pastor to the flock, that it needs 
his guidance and admonition; therefore the arrow 
flights of short, pithy suggestion. These piercing ex- 
hortations are pointed and barbed with the keenest 
common sense and worldly wisdom. He becomes all 
things to all men. 

These informal, personal greetings to persons to 
whom Paul especially desires to be remembered, or 
from persons with whom he is associated who wish 
to send their salutations to those in the church he is 
addressing, very human and kindly, bridge for us the 


178 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


gulf of centuries with a sense of fellow-feeling and 
remind us that personal ties long ago in the Roman 
Empire thrilled across separation and exile as they do 
to-day. 

Sixth and last comes the apostolic benediction, 
varied in form, now brief and business-like, now ex- 
panded and sonorous, as if the great Apostle had ex- 
tended his hands over his hearers in blessing. These 
benedictions are so appropriate and so happy in their 
phrasing that we have never got away from them, 
but use them to close our services to this day. 

Here are contrasted examples: 

To the Galatians Paul pithily says in good-by: 


“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your 
spirit, brothers. Amen.” 


To the Romans, his voice rings out like a bell in 
dignity and majesty, in balance and harmony: 


“Now to Him who can strengthen you by my gospel, 
by the preaching of Jesus Christ, by revealing the 
secret purpose which after the silence of long ages has 
now been disclosed and made known on the basis of 
the prophetic scriptures (by command of the eternal 
God) to all the Gentiles for their obedience to the 
faith—to the only wise God be glory through Jesus 
Christ for ever and ever: Amen.” 


There is, of course, variation from the order of 
these six portions of an epistle,—Paul is often hurried 
and unsystematic, to be sure; but in the main this is 
the order upon which a Pauline letter may be said to 
proceed. 


Chapter XXII 
LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 


Coming now more properly to the literary style of 
Paul, we cannot too often be impressed with the fact 
that he is writing personal letters, not books, or 
treatises. His writing therefore is purely informal, 
colloquial, familiar. Yet this does not justify us in 
going so far as some go in declaring that, “it is 
hazardous to speak of a Pauline style,’ and that “the 
subjects on which he writes are too varied, the moods 
that influence him too changing, while the freedom 
of the epistolary form hinders all approach to a fixed 
and characteristic style.” 

We are perfectly justifiable in saying that he is far 
from being always a model of style. It is certainly 
true that his writing is changeable as the most sensi- 
tive and capricious day in April—now lowering with 
clouds, now pouring in tender showers, now blowing 
with fierce reminders of winter, now shining with the 
gold of summer sunshine—but to say that Paul had 
no style is going too far. You could scarcely fail 
to detect an epistle of his by its earmarks if there 
were no superscription. You can readily distinguish 
between his writing, for example, and that of the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 

Certain it is, however, that Paul did not attempt 
literary excellence. He is very far from polishing his 


periods or paying great heed to the form and manner 
179 


180 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


of conveying his thoughts. No sewing on of purple 
patches, no painting in of cypress trees! It is thought 
he is after. Of the form he is unconscious. Where 
he sings, it is because the thought sings in him. Where 
his language soars, it is because the thought has wings. 
Where he chooses words of such power and simplicity 
that no amount of careful study could alter them to 
advantage, it is because the thought inspires him, makes 
him a seer in the forests of words, and infallible in 
his choice. 

In fact he does not claim excellency of speech. He 
tells his Corinthians that he did not come in that way, 
but determined to know nothing among them save 
Christ and him crucified. And it is this very devo- 
tion to high purpose, this disregard of the clothing 
of his thought, that gives him power. This has been 
the salvation of many a man’s literary style. Devo- 
tion to a purpose with a deep feeling of responsibility 
has kept many a writer and speaker simple who might 
have been artificial; plain and forceful, who might 
have been bombastic; direct, who might have been 
diffuse. Many persons who can talk like plain honest 
men begin to strut and swagger and put on self- 
conscious airs as soon as pen touches paper. Only 
a message can cure such. Many a man’s style has 
been saved by his message. So Abraham Lincoln. So 
John Bunyan. So Paul of Tarsus. | 

Paul’s very disregard of the rules of composition— 
even if he knew them—adding sometimes to the rough- 
ness of his sentences, adds often also to their power 
and eloquence. A single example—who would part 
with those sentences in which he piles one genitive on 


LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 181 


top of another so that the English translation gives 
four or more prepositional phrases immediately fol- 
lowing each other: 


“The knowledge of God’s glory in the face of 
Christy (Tl Coro LV: 6). 


“The light thrown by the gospel of the glory of 
Christ "Gly Vora livia), 


Limping style it may be, but noble eloquence. 

Stalker says: “Nowhere perhaps will there be found 
so exact a parallel to the style of Paul as in the letters 
and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. In the Protector’s 
brain there lay the best and truest thoughts about Eng- 
land and her complicated affairs which existed at the 
time among Englishmen; but when he tried to express 
them in speech or letter there issued from his mind 
the most extraordinary mixture of exclamations, ques- 
tions, arguments, soon losing themselves in sands of 
words, unwieldy parentheses, and subduing eloquence. 

“Yet, as you read these amazing utterances, you come 
by degrees to feel that you are getting to see the very 
heart and soul of the Puritan era, and that you would 
rather be beside this man than any other representative 
of the period. Perhaps, indeed, a certain formlessness 
is a natural accompaniment of the very highest origi- 
nality. When great thoughts are for the first time 
coming forth there is a kind of primordial roughness 
about them, as if the earth out of which they are aris- 
ing were still clinging to them; the polishing of the 
gold comes late and has to be preceded by the heaving 
of the ore out of the bowels of nature. Paul in his 


182 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


writings is hurling forth the original ore of truth.” 

Illustrations of this fact come out of our memories 
of literature with Emerson, Carlyle, Montaigne, down 
to Bernard Shaw and Knut Hamsun. New and origi- 
nal thought, new and original art, besides its frequent 
formlessness, develops power to put the world by the 
ears, to upset men, foment differences among them, 
and serve as a divider before it becomes a uniter. 

To analyze Paul’s sentence structure, the figures of 
speech, the little ways and manners, unconsciously per- 
formed, will present the salient literary characteristics 
of our Apostle. Reference has already been made to 
the long involved sentences, modifying phrases and 
clauses, the parentheses, which reveal the overflowing 
abundance of the thoughts of Paul. He begins with 
an idea, and presently a whole troop of associates 
comes flocking in from all sides to entangle his subject 
or predicate, to overpower it, while his sentence struc- 
ture, staggering under the weight, drops shattered to 
the ground. How full must have been his mind, since 
he produced three such books as Galatians, Second 
Corinthians, and Romans in six months’ time, and that, 
too, amid his other constant and absorbing activities. 
Sometimes, with Paul, a single sentence was no light 
thing. 

Turn to the third chapter of Ephesians and read 
the first paragraph. There are three sentences cover- 
ing thirteen verses; and two of them cover twelve 
verses : 


“For this reason I Paul, I whom Jesus has made a 
prisoner for the sake of you Gentiles—for surely you 


LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 183 


have heard how the grace of God which was vouch- 
safed me in your interests has ordered it, how the 
divine secret was disclosed to me by a revelation (if 
you read what I have already written briefly about 
this, you can understand my insight into that secret 
of Christ which was not disclosed to the sons of men 
in other generations as it has now been revealed to 
his sacred apostles and prophets by the Spirit), namely, 
that in Christ Jesus the Gentiles are co-heirs, com- 
panions, and co-partners in the Promise. Such is the 
gospel which I was called to serve by the endowment 
of God’s grace which was vouchsafed me, by the en- 
ergy of his power; less than the least of all saints as 
I am, this grace was vouchsafed me, that I should 
bring the Gentiles the gospel of the fathomless wealth 
of Christ and enlighten all men upon the new order 
of that divine secret which God the Creator of all con- 
cealed from eternity—intending to let the full sweep 
of the divine wisdom be disclosed now by the church 
to the angelic Rulers and Authorities in the heavenly 
sphere, in terms of the eternal purpose which he has 
realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom, as 
we have faith in him, we enjoy our confidence of free 
access. So I beg of you not to lose heart over what 
I am suffering on your behalf; my sufferings are an 
honour to you.” 


It is difficult to read this passage aloud; yet it is 
touching, sincere, exalted. 

Not all of his sentences, however, are thus formless. 
Many of them are balanced and skillfully poised. The 
fact that there was, among Greek rhetoricians, a 


184 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


studied manner of forming sentences, does not indi- 
cate that Paul followed their artificiality of style or 
was educated in their methods. At.the River Styx, 
the famous waterman is represented as saying to a 
rhetorician just stepping into the boat: “You must 
strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is 
wrapped round you, and those antitheses of yours, 
and balancing of clauses, and strange expressions, and 
all the other heavy weights of speech or you will make 
my boat heavy.” But Lucian would not have included 
Paul’s natural and impulsive periods in his satire. In 
the first chapter of First Corinthians we read: 


“Why, look at your own ranks, my brothers; not 
many wise men (that is, judged by human standards), 
not many leading men, not many of good birth, have 
been called: 

No, 

God has chosen what is foolish in the world 
to shame the wise; 
God has chosen what is weak in the world 
to shame what is strong; 
God has chosen what is mean and despised in the 
world— 
things which are not, to put down things that 
are; 
that no person may boast in the sight of God.” 


“Knowledge puffs up, love builds up” (I Cor. 
ARS 


“To Greeks and to barbarians, to wise and to fool- 


LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 185 


ish alike, I owe a duty. Hence my eagerness to preach 
the gospel to you in Rome as well” (Rom. I: 14-15). 


Well-balanced and periodic sentences appear in the 
hymn to love in First Corinthians, thirteen: 


“T may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
but if I have no love, 
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; 
I may prophesy, fathom all mysteries and secret lore, 
I may have such absolute faith that I can move hills 
from their place, 
but if I have no love, 
Y count for nothing; 
I may distribute all I possess in charity, 
I may give up my body to be burnt, 
but if I have no love, 
I make nothing of it. 
Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no jeal- 
ousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is 
never rude, never selfish, never irritated, never re- 
sentful; love is never glad when others go wrong, 
love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, 
always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always 
patient. Love never disappears. As for prophesying, 
it will be superseded; as for ‘tongues,’ they will cease; 
as for knowledge, it will be superseded. For we only 
know bit by bit, and we only prophesy bit by bit; but 
when the perfect comes, the imperfect will be super- 
seded. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I 
thought like a child, I argued like a child; now that 
I am a man, I am done with childish ways. 


186 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


At present we only see the baffling reflections in a 
mirror, 
but then it will be face to face; 
at present [ am learning bit by bit, 
but then I shall understand, as all along I have 
myself been understood. 
Thus ‘faith and hope and love last on, these three,’ 
but the greatest of all is love.” 


One would think, indeed, that this whole chapter 
had passed under the hand of the lapidary. It is 
polished, refined, so that a stroke of the chisel, or 
even a single finger-touch, would mar its perfect 
beauty. Yet it was dictated, dashed off hurriedly, 
to an amanuensis. Perhaps, however, it is a passage 
that Paul had often declaimed by word of mouth in 
sermon or address, the result of long thought and use. 

Sometimes the method of balance or contrast is car- 
ried so far as the paradox. This appears in First 
Corinthians, seven: 


“T mean, brothers,— 
the interval has been shortened; 

so let those who have wives live as if they had none, 
let mourners live as if they were not mourning, 
let the joyful live as if they had no joy, 

let buyers live as if they had no hold on their goods, 
let those who mix in the world live as if they were 

not engrossed in it, 
for the present phase of things is passing away.” 


An oft-quoted and artistic passage, as well as an 


LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 187 


appealing one, is found in the “Love-letter to the Phi- 
lippians,’ fourth chapter: 


“Finally, brothers, keep in mind whatever is true, 
whatever is worthy, whatever is just, whatever is pure, 
whatever is attractive, whatever is high-toned, all ex- 
cellence, all merit.” 


The nervous quality of the style appears often in 
the rhetorical question and exclamation. These tell 
strongly, produce excellent effect. Spice and tang come 
from them and reveal the eagerness and earnestness 
of the writer. 


“What can ever part us from Christ’s love?” 
“When God acquits, who shall condemn?” 
“Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift!’ 
“Who will rescue me from this body of death?” 


St. Paul is fond of employing a climax of three 
short, sharp, crisp words, phrases, or statements, like 
three steps leading up to a point of vantage: 


“All belongs to you; and you belong to Christ, and 
Christ to God.” 

“T have fought in the good fight; I have run my 
course; I have kept the faith.” 

“Thus ‘faith and hope and love last on, these three,’ 
but the greatest of all is love.” 


These little climaxes of three might be multiplied 
almost indefinitely. Three is a favorite number with 


188 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


preachers; they are happy when their subject falls 
into three divisions; they are conscious of a certain 
satisfaction, as most public speakers are, when a sen- 
tence contains three terms, phrases, or clauses, which 
grow larger toward the end. Paul is no exception. 
Yet he employs four steps, at times, to reach his emi- 
nence, instead of three, as: 


“Watch, stand firm in the faith, play the man, be 
strong!” 


Sometimes his climax is longer, and musically 
grander, as he slowly lifts himself and his reader to 
an exalted height: 


“What can ever part us from Christ’s love? Can 
anguish or calamity or persecution or famine or naked- 
ness or danger or the sword? (Because, as it is 
written, 


“For thy sake we are being killed all the day long, 
we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ ) 


“No, in all this we are more than conquerors through 
him who loved us. For I am certain neither death 
nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the 
present nor the future, no powers of the Height or of 
the Depth, nor anything else in all creation will be 
able to part us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our 
Lord.”’ 


Then there is the funeral chant in First Corinthians, 
fifteen, like the dead march from Saul: 


LITERARY GRANDEUR OF PAUL 189 


“Here is a secret truth for you: not all of us are 
to die, but all of us are to be changed—changed in a 
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet- 
call. The trumpet will sound, the dead will rise im- 
perishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishing 
body must be invested with the imperishable, and this 
mortal body invested with immortality; and when this 
mortal body has been invested with immortality, then 
the saying of Scripture will be realized, 

“Death is swallowed up in victory. 

“O Death, where is your victory? 

“O Death, where is your sting? 

“The victory is ours, thank God! He makes it ours 
by our Lord Jesus Christ. Well then, my beloved 
brothers, hold your ground, immovable; abound in 
work for the Lord at all times, for you may be sure 
that in the Lord your labour is never thrown away.” 


Some think that the last verse of this chapter should 
have been made the first verse of the next—‘Well 
then, my beloved brothers, hold your ground, immovy- 
able’’—for it is practical exhortation and belongs with 
the subject of the “collection for the saints” and other 
more mundane affairs of the sixteenth chapter. St. 
Paul did not divide his writings into chapters and 
verses; somebody else did this, far down in the cen- 
turies, purely arbitrarily and for the sake of con- 
venient reference; and the divisions are at times not 
only uninspired, but stupid. 

There is nothing more touching, more noble, in 
Paul’s writings than his charge to his son in the faith, 
Timothy, written near the end, in the prison at Rome: 


1909 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who 
will judge the living and the dead, in the light of 
his appearance and his reign, I adjure you to preach 
the word; keep at it in season and out of season, re- 
futing, checking, and exhorting men; never lose pa- 
tience with them, and never give up your teaching, for 
the time will come when people will decline to be 
taught sound doctrine and will accumulate teachers 
to suit themselves and tickle their own fancies; they 
will give up listening to the Truth and turn to myths. 

“Whatever happens, be self-possessed, flinch from 
no suffering, do your work as an evangelist, and dis- 
charge all your duties as a minister. 

“The last drops of my own sacrifice are falling; 
my time to go has come. I have fought in the good 
fight; I have run my course; I have kept the faith. 
Now the crown of a good life awaits me, with which 
the Lord, that just Judge, will reward me on the great 
Day—and not only me but all who have loved and 
longed for his appearance.” 


Chapter XXIII 
SOME OF PAUL’S LITERARY WAYS 


The use of quotation by St. Paul stands out con- 
spicuous for its rarity. To be sure he quotes now 
and again from the Old Testament, and always from 
the Septuagint, or Greek version; but never from 
classic authors except in the address at Athens, in 
which he is reported as saying: 


“As some of your own poets have said, 
‘We too belong to His race.’ ” 


Of the quotations from the Old Testament, as in- 
deed of Hebrew history in general, he makes the same 
peculiar rabbinical uses that his early companions, the 
Pharisees and scribes of the law, were accustomed to 
do. Inshort, he rabbinizes, employs what amounts to a 
figure of speech of its own kind—a most remarkable 
bending and twisting of the text to suit his immediate 
end. In Jewish ears there rasped no offense in this 
queer ingenious figure; quite to the contrary it had 
convincing, pleasing value. 

Thus he tells (I Cor. X) how the fathers in Israel 
were all “baptized into Moses by the cloud and by the 
sea.’ We had thought they escaped the sea, and were 
led by the cloud. Then he further avers that “all 
drank the same supernatural drink (drinking from the 
supernatural Rock which accompanied them—and that 


Rock was Christ).”’ We remember something about 
191 


192 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Moses smiting a rock from which gushed water for 
thirsty Israel; but we do not recall that the rock 
followed them, rolled along behind them through the 
wilderness of Sinai. Still less do we remember that 
Christ ever identified himself with that rock. This 
poetic license, if you please to term it such,—perhaps 
theological license were better,—is unconvincing to a 
western mind. We ought to keep ourselves aware 
in reading the Scriptures that they were written by 
orientals and that we cannot always appreciate the 
fine points of their reasoning or their style. 

Another remarkable example of this favorite figure 
of the rabbis occurs in the matter of the veil over the 
face of Moses, as set forth in the Second Corinthian 
letter. We had always supposed from the Hebrew 
account, that Moses had placed the veil over his coun- 
tenance because Israel could not bear the shining face 
of him who had so recently talked with God; but Paul 
tells us the veil was there so that Israel might not 
detect the fading of the glory, might keep them “from 
gazing at the last rays of a fading glory.” Then 
in the next breath, the veil is transferred to the eyes 
of Israel so that their minds are to this day blinded 
in the reading of the Old Testament. Presently the 
veil is over their hearts and not to be done away 
except in Christ. In fact the veil floats around from 
the face of Moses to the eyes of Israel and then to 
their hearts, until we are mystified as to just what is 
its location; but that is all due only to the literal and 
material tendency to accuracy in our occidental minds. 

Still another case in point is the use made of the 
story of Hagar and Sarah in Galatians as typical, re- 


SOME OF PAUL’S LITERARY WAYS 193 


spectively, of Sinai and the Jerusalem of this earth 
in comparison with the Jerusalem above. The bond- 
woman’s children are set over against those of the 
free woman to illustrate the separation between the old 
covenant and the new. It is all very interesting, but 
to us somewhat elusive. 

Repetition is a favorite expedient of St. Paul when 
he wishes very definitely and forcefully to drive home 
an idea, as if by stroke on stroke with a hammer. 
He pounds a word in and clinches it. What a loss 
it would be, too, if by any possibility there should 
be shaken out of heart and memory such a passage 
as that in Second Corinthians, first chapter, in which 
the word comfort or consolation is repeated either as 
verb or noun ten times in four verses: 


“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Father of tender mercies and the God of 
all comfort, who comforts me in all my distress, so 
that I am able to comfort people who are in any dis- 
tress by the comfort with which I myself am com- 
forted by God. For as the sufferings of Christ are 
abundant in my case, so my comfort is also abundant 
through Christ. If I am in distress, it is in the in- 
terests of your comfort and salvation; if I am com- 
forted, it is in the interests of your comfort, which 
is effective as it nerves you to endure the same suffer- 
ings as I suffer myself. Hence my hope for you is 
well-founded, since I know that as you share the suf- 
ferings you share the comfort also.”’ 


In the English translation, the word glory, and its 


194 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


adjective glorious likewise occur ten times in four 
verses in II Cor. III. So the contrast between “Seen 
and Unseen,’ in II Cor. V. 


“For those of us whose eyes are on the unseen, not 
on the seen; for the seen is transient, the unseen 
eternal.” 


If Paul desires that you shall not forget something 
he seeks to tell you, he sees to it that you shall not 
forget. Little cares he for the effect on style, which 
after all is not bad, and which is deliberately sought 
by so eminent and fastidious a stylist as Matthew 
Arnold in that essay, for example, where “sweetness 
and light’? is hammered home until the nail-head is 
buried in memory. 

Paul likes to play upon words, in short to pun. 
This tendency is with him almost as pronounced as 
with Shakespeare. Of course this juggling with words 
does not develop in the English version, but appears 
only in the original. A hint of it, however, may be 
caught in Romans III: 1-3: 


“Then what is the Jew’s superiority? . . . Much 
in every way. This to begin with—Jews were en- 
trusted (entrusted) with the scriptures of God. Even 
supposing some of them have proved untrustworthy 
(were without faith), is their faithlessness (want of 
faith) to cancel the faithfulness (faithfulness) of 
God ?” 


The italicized words here are all of one root; and 


SOME OF PAUL’S LITERARY WAYS 195 


Paul plays upon it four times. Another instance is 
Galatians V:7: 


“Who was it that prevented you from obeying the 
Truth? ‘That sort of suasion does not come from Him 
who called you!’ 

Italics again indicate the play upon the word. 

Certain lines of St. Paul ring out with an almost 
Homeric onomatopoetic value. Who does not remem- 
ber how his Greek professor—if the student were 
fortunate in possessing one with a big personality and 
a sonorous voice—used to intone the lines of the Iliad, 
beating them out with a ruler or a pointer until you 
could hear the twang of the bowstring or the rolling 
of the waves. Homer had no monopoly in this music 
of tongue. While Paul doubtless sought consciously 
no such aim, nevertheless his words sometimes sound 
like the objects of which he writes. 

Perhaps this copying of sounds into words comes 
as second nature to a musical soul whose business it 
is to deal in words. An artist is an artist, whether 
conscious of his genius or not; and Paul is sensitive 
to sound and color. Here again, of course, one cannot 
quite carry over into English the onomatopoeia; but 
a bit of it appears, for example, in I Cor. XIII: 


“T may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
but if I have no love, 
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” 


The vivid concreteness of the metaphors of Paul 
cannot be overlooked. His figures of speech are at 
times startling: 


196 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


“If you snap at each other and prey ‘upon each 
other, take care in case you destroy one another.” 


Everybody is familiar with the wild dogs of oriental 
cities, the shaggy, ragged, homeless beasts who scay- 
enge the gutters, and serve in place of a sewerage 
system. Modern travelers know them in Constanti- 
nople and Damascus; know their heart-hunger, so 
great that one does not dare pet one of them for 
fear a hundred will come fawning at him; and know 
how they have their own sections of the city, their 
particular hunting-grounds, with boundaries fixed, be- 
yond which they dare not range lest their neighbors 
set on them and tear them to bits. These wild dogs 
furnish Paul his figure. The Galatian churches, fac- 
tional and fighting, would rend and tear each other 
to pieces if they kept up their conflicts. 

Again: “Miserable wretch that I am! Who will 
rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom. VII: 24). 

Here the figure of speech suggests a corpse, stiff 
and cold, heavy and hard, bound upon one’s shoulders, 
from which one cannot shake himself free. Sin feels 
just as revolting as that; the sense of sin, just as 
depressing. ‘The story goes that in the Siberian mines, 
under the old Russian régime, prisoners worked two 
and two, chained together and left alone in remote 
galleries for days at a time with a bit of black bread 
and some water. Sometimes one died, and the other 
found himself chained to a corpse, every hour grow- 
ing more dreadful. Such is to some of us the helpless 
sense of guilt. Ask men in prison; ask victims of 
drink and drugs, excesses and disease. Paul uses the 


SOME OF PAUL’S LITERARY WAYS 197 


strongest and best figure for the profoundest sense of 
sin, then joyfully exclaims in answer to the question, 
“Who will rescue me from this corpse?” ‘God will! 
Thanks be to him through Jesus Christ our Lord!” 

Time and space would fail to set forth in detail his 
imagery, his happy illustrations. Since, however, fig- 
ures of speech come as naturally to the child of the 
forest and the untutored as to the cultivated, nothing 
can be argued from their use, as to his training in 
Greek schools of rhetoric. Since even the wild In- 
dian’s speech is celebrated for its vivid figurativeness, 
it is not surprising to find this son of the Temple em- 
ploying all the arts of rhetoric that had been dissected 
and analyzed by the cultivated Greek; nay, it is not 
surprising to find him unconsciously excelling in the 
use of these very arts, which are sometimes all the 
more powerful for being unconscious. There are few 
beautifiers of style so efficacious as an earnest and liv- 
ing message. Paul had something to say, and his 
heart was straitened till that word should be said. He 
had a message, and woe was him except he proclaimed 
it. 

Already, in a measure, we have tried St. Paul by 
the conventional tests as to clearness, force, and ease. 

Not always does his work shine with the transpar- 
ency of a mountain stream. Its defects in this regard, 
due at times to the length and involved character of 
his sentence structure, which in turn is due to the 
process of dictation, are manifest even to a cursory 
examination. Nevertheless, when Paul is dead-in- 
earnest that he shall be understood, none can be crisper 
and plainer in his utterance. When he makes his im- 


198 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


mortal fight against the excesses of the Judaizers in 
Galatia, there can be no mistaking his meaning. It 
fairly blazes from his pages. So evident was that 
meaning that Paul won his point and kept the Gala- 
tian churches free. 

The same things apply to the tests for force. At 
times, his circumlocutions detract from vigor of ut- 
terance, but at others there is no gainsaying the gal- 
vanic power of his words. That he “speaks mere 
flames,” as Luther .said, is evident. The effect of his 
letters is sufficiently clear in the current sayings re- 
garding him which he himself quotes: “His bodily 
presence is weak, but his letters powerful.”’ 

For ease he does not seek, though often he attains 
it. Force means more to him than any other quality. 
To reach the minds and hearts of his readers and 
stab them or shock them broad awake, this is the aim. 
Clearness, of course, is necessary and the ease which 
promotes clearness, but force in the great emergencies, 
as when the freedom of the new faith is involved in 
Galatia, this is more important than all. Paul would 
have gained in ease, as has already been suggested, if 
he had taken time to revise. It is hard work on the 
part of the writer that promotes ease on the part of 
the reader. Time spent at one end of the line means 
time saved at the other. Nevertheless, much of his 
work flows as quietly and smoothly as if he had spent 
hours and days perfecting it. Almost any of the great 
passages so frequently cited in these pages proves this 
assertion. 


Chapter XXIV 
PAUIZS LIBES TOLD Yat oy CHT RS 


There are few authors whose works more need to 
be observed in chronological order than Paul. He was 
converted about 37 A.D. when about 33 or 34 years 
old. He wrote the Thessalonian letters about fifteen 
or sixteen years later, that is, at 52 or 53. He wrote 
II Timothy, about fifteen or sixteen years later than 
that, somewhere about 65 to 67. His writings there- 
fore cover the period of his life from about fifty 
years of age to sixty-three or sixty-four. 

During that time, the growth of Paul’s thought is 
quite evident. His expectation of the immediate com- 
ing of the Messiah, so vivid in the First Thessalonian 
letter, grows less and less confident and assured. In- 
deed, that first letter to the church at Thessalonica,— 
the modern Saloniki, of striking acquaintance—put 
that little band of Christians all on edge with anticipa- 
tion of the Advent. They quit work, they grew idle 
and disputatious. They robed themselves, no doubt, 
in garments of white and ascended hilltops to be ready 
for the second coming of the Lord. Paul is forced 
to write a second letter hurriedly to counteract these 
excesses. From this time on, his hope of the imme- 
diate approach of the Christ grows less and less con- 
fident, until, at the sad dark end, in the prison at Rome, 


he has little or nothing to say of it, knowing that 
199 


200 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


he, Paul, rather shall go to Christ than that Christ 
shall come to him. 

His theology, too, passes from a fluent into a crys- 
tallized form; and one can well feel that his style 
grows somewhat softer with the growing years. Not 
that it is less vigorous and virile, for it grows, as he 
grows older, more intense and accentuated; but rather 
that his tone is mellowed, with advancing years, like 
the tone of an organ or a bell. One cannot say that 
he grows preéminently tenderer—for who could be 
gentler and kinder than the author of Thessalonians ? 
—but he apparently gains capacity for tenderness, wit- 
ness the “Love-Letter” to the Philippians. The pas- 
toral letters are tragic in their pathos, resignation, 
courageous facing of the end. In the last chapters 
of II Corinthians—his apologia pro vita sua—begins 
the argumentative style, which is continued in Gala- 
tians and then Romans. We can see in the first of 
this group the rise of the irrepressible conflict, the 
first flashings of the storm, which are continued until 
the conflict proves victorious in the calmer placidity 
of the stately Roman letter—the last of the great 
argumentative group. Then follow the epistles of the 
imprisonment—letters in which the conflict with the 
Judaizers, so far as Paul’s concern extends, is finished. 
He is now settled in his thinking, confirmed in his 
theology, calm in his triumphant waiting for the end. 

Deep now is the tenderness of the Philippian letter. 
Confident is the adoration of Christ in the Ephesian 
and Colossian letters. Quietly playful the personal 
letter to Philemon. So they run on until the cold dark 
end, when left alone, with only Luke, the beloved 


PAUL’S LIFE TOLD BY HIS LETTERS 201 


physician, he begs for his cloak to shield him from 
the winter in the dungeon. He breathes his sadness, 
yet with a faith unwavering and exultant: “I have 
fought in the good fight; I have run my course; I 
have kept the faith.” There is no braver swan-song. 

Always interesting in any work of literature is the 
unconscious revelation of himself rendered by the 
author. He may deal only with things far removed 
from himself, and yet all the time be making a clear 
picture of himself. The more likely is this to be true, 
if, like Paul, he is writing personal letters, human 
communications, sometimes very close and intimate. 
We shall find much autobiographical matter in the 
letters of St. Paul, much that reveals his heart. 

The character of one’s illustrations necessarily re- 
flects somewhat one’s environment. Before we are 
aware we are comparing and explaining matters with 
what goes on around us. Paul is no exception; and 
his figures of speech ratify what we know of his life. 

Thus he shows a commercial environment. He has 
walked by the docks of Tarsus on the Cydnus where 
ships from the East and the West unloaded their bur- 
dens, where silks and gold from the Orient and pearls 
and spices from the South, where timber and goats’ 
hair from the Taurus mountains, and the transport 
trade through the famous pass called the Cilician gates, 
made rich the Jews and Greeks of this commercial 
birthplace of Saul. He sees the slaves bearing these 
burdens. He sees the young heir of the merchant- 
prince strut leisurely among that of which he is lord, 
although he is not yet vastly different from the slave 
in power. Yet he sees the riches of this inheritance. 


202 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


He sees the docks and markets thronged with stewards 
rushing hither and thither with tablets in their hands. 
He sees the garbage, spoiled fruits and offal of fish, 
cast into the harbor. He sees great buildings erected, 
warehouses, temples, schools and colleges, in that seat 
of ancient learning; and he thinks back to them when 
he talks of building on the chief cornerstone, of build- 
ing in wood, hay, stubble, of the house that we all 
possess, not made with hands, but eternal in the 
heavens. 

He reveals also the military environment. How 
frequently does he talk of the “armour of light” and 
“the armour of righteousness” until at last in one of 
the letters of the imprisonment, he describes minutely 
all the portions of the armor. Frequently he illus- 
trates by separate pieces of armor, as the breastplate 
and helmet. The military band clashes and clangs 
in his ears, as he writes. Furthermore, he shows that 
he is moving continually in a Greek environment, with 
Greek civilization, arts, and games about him. 

One of Paul’s most remarkable rhetorical traits 
strikes the reader in the entire absence of illustrations 
drawn from nature. There is practically no apprecia- 
tion of the wonders of the physical world in his writ- 
ings. He must have seen some of the rarest and 
fairest features that nature unfolds. He spent his 
childhood at the foot of the Taurus mountains back 
of Tarsus, ‘fon whose snowy peaks the inhabitants 
of the town were wont, in summer evenings, to watch 
from the flat roofs of their houses the glow of the 
sunset.” He lived within the sound of the great cata- 
ract of the Cydnus river, pouring over the black basalt 


PAUL’S LIFE TOLD BY HIS LETTERS 2038 


cliffs, just above the town. He had traveled up and 
down the green valley of Jordan, with its lower end 
crawling into the salt pit of the Dead Sea, over which 
hovered a barren and desolate air, and with its upper 
end springing from the blue waves of Galilee which 
lapped a shore of willows, oleanders, acacia, anemone, 
and lilies of the valley. He had seen the Vale of 
Shechem, the bold, fair face of Carmel, the dews of 
Hermon. He had seen the “Paradise of God” which 
surrounds Damascus, where the Pharpar and the 
Golden Abana transform the wilderness into a gar- 
den. He had sailed the Mediterranean, with its Bos- 
phorus and Bay of Naples, with its Cyprus and Sicily, 
and he had seen the same Mediterranean terrible in 
its wrath. He had seen the snow on the Albans, and 
the fire from Vesuvius. But all these wonders and 
beauties of nature seem to have no weight with him. 
He is so much a man of cities and the dusty faces of 
busy men that he has no eyes for the glories of the 
outer world. 

In this, he is a strong contrast to our Saviour, whose 
beautiful language is redolent of the flowers of the 
valley and radiant with the song of birds; who is ever 
cognizant of the shepherds and the sowers, the grapes 
and the thorns, the figs and the thistles, the pearls 
and the grass of the field, the wolves and the foxes 
and the fish of the sea, the harvest and the vineyard, 
the serpents and the doves, the sparrows and the reeds 
shaken by the wind, the mustard seed and the yokes 
of the oxen, the tares and the wheat. Indefinitely we 
might go on turning over the pages of Jesus’ words 
and find them filled with the country air, the breath 


204 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


of the spirit that breathes where it wills, over Olivet 
and Jordan and the valleys all round. 

Not so with Paul. His illustrations are all drawn 
from the marts and the quays, the streets and the 
shops and the lives of men. He talks of buildings 
and temples, citizenship in heaven, thieves in the night, 
women in travail, babes and milk, sleepers and drunk- 
ards, leaven, the members of the body, and if for the 
moment he turns to talk of planting and watering, 
he is thinking rather of the controversy among the 
Corinthians over Apollos and Cephas and himself, and 
of the increase of their labors—for instantly he turns 
back again to the foundations and buildings; and he 
is, in the next chapter, talking about garbage and off- 
scouring. 

If, for a moment, he talked of the fruits of the 
spirit, we see that he has just been referring to the 
“works of the flesh,” and we are not sure that he 
uses the word fruit as referring to the fruit of trees 
or the fruit of the body. Even if he does mean the 
product of the orchard, it is but one word from the 
natural world. If he talks of grafting the wild-olive, 
his thought, after all, fastens itself to an agricultural 
process, the work of men. All his thought centers 
upon the virtues of men that he is enumerating. 
Scarcely a glance of his mind ever turns toward na- 
ture. His life and thought run in the busy and dusty 
paths of men. One thinks inevitably of Robert Brown- 
ing, the modern poet of crowded city life. 

As to the bearing of Paul’s style on the question 
of his Greek culture, the evidence of his manner is 


PAUL’S LIFE TOLD BY HIS LETTERS 205 


all against his having had extensive training. Paul 
was not a cultivated Greek rhetorician. He certainly 
came into contact with Greek institutions and litera- 
ture. The Roman world was a Greek world. Rome 
was a Greek city. Even Jerusalem had become largely 
Grecianized, and the Pharisees were the only party 
which opposed the introduction of Greek customs. 

The Sadducees and the Herodians pursued a policy 
of Grecianizing the people, and introduced Greek 
games. The young Jews became athletes and in order 
to strip and present good appearance, had to avoid 
any disfigurement of their bodies; hence the opposi- 
tion of the Pharisees to that which endangered an 
ancient Jewish rite. Paul, then, Pharisee of Phari- 
sees, would naturally have learned much of that which 
he had to oppose. He traveled with Barnabas, who 
perhaps possessed some Greek culture. He constantly 
came in contact with Greek-speaking people and learned 
their modes of thought. He read the Septuagint. 

These facts are all that the style of Paul will war- 
rant us in assuming. He is very far from possessing 
the amount of polish, for example, that the writer to 
the Hebrews possessed. Paul is a plain, blunt man 
and not polished as a self-contained Greek. Undoubt- 
edly if he went to a Greek school of rhetoric in Tarsus, 
he forgot all he had there learned in Jerusalem and 
Antioch. 

His use of Greek quotations, however, and his em- 
ployment of illustrations draw from Greek and Roman 
life does signify that his tolerance was broad toward 
the heathen world, that he had shaken loose from 


206 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Pharisaism, and that his conversion was genuine. 
He could eat meat offered to idols without asking 
questions, he could become all things to all men. 

The dignity of the salutations and the benedictions 
with which he opens and closes his letters, the modest 
self-confidence of his bearing, strike one at once. 
These salutations, we have already seen, are not the 
merely formal greetings that characterized the Greek 
and Roman letters. They are longer and greater. 
Some men need but to enter a room or to offer a 
salutation, and their dignity reveals itself. 

Sometimes his dignity becomes indignation. He has 
to assert himself against false accusers. Galatians is 
his most indignant outburst against his enemies. The 
only epistle he wrote with his own hand except 
Philemon, he dashes off in large, angry characters. 
You can almost imagine his stylus digging into the 
wax or crackling over the papyrus, as he pronounces 
his anathema against false teachers and Antichrists. 

He can wound his opponents deeply, and can wield 
subtle irony and cutting satire. Yet he can admin- 
ister rebuke so kindly! Language to him was, in 
Farrar’s comparison, like the fabled spear of Achilles, 
which, while used to wound, might be used to heal. 
His language is sometimes so vivid, so broken with 
passion, as in the Galatian letter, that many a sentence 
is begun and never finished, as some new thought 
crowds out the incompleted one. You would almost 
fancy sometimes that Paul stood before you defending 
himself. You can see his brow cloudy with anger; 
you can see his clenched hand gesticulating against his 
accusers; you can see his deprecating gesture as he 


PAUL’S LIFE TOLD BY HIS LETTERS 207 


tells, half hesitating, the sorrows he has borne and 
the triumphant visions he has seen. You can see his 
glance fall, and a shade of humble melancholy sweep 
over his face as he tells of the thorn in the flesh, the 
minister of Satan. 

The Vatican manuscript contains the notice that the 
rhetorician Longinus concluded an enumeration of the 
great orators with Paul of Tarsus, who, he said, might 
even be pronounced first. So generally the world has 
placed him, the premier of preachers. Some modern 
scholars have denied that such power and place should 
be ascribed to Paul, saying that he did not try to be 
a rhetorician. Whether he tried or not, he succeeded 
in writing like a great speaker; and a great speaker, 
no doubt he was. 

His dignity and his humility, his vehemence and 
his tenderness, his anger and his gentleness, show the 
reaches of a diversified nature. He could console the 
sorrowing as in the Thessalonian and Philippian let- 
ters; he could fathom delicately the secret recesses of 
the heart and reprove as gently as he could fiercely. 
Indeed, he could even administer the reproof with a 
kindly jest. 

Sometimes there is apparent an almost feminine 
sensitiveness and shrinking from rough contact with 
the world. This acuteness of feeling shows us what 
fortitude and bravery must have been his in his perils 
on the sea and on the land, in the city, in the country, 
at the hands of friends or of strangers. 

There is a quiet, businesslike practicality in the 
short, sharp sentences regarding daily life with which 
he concludes almost all his epistles; although never 


208 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


does this practicality escape from the sense of the di- 
vine presence in the world. 

At other times he is the mystic, the rapt seer with 
kindling eye, and pale enthusiasm, with nervous fire, 
and cloud-piercing vision, while he predicts the second 
coming, or the resurrection, or declares the wonder 
of a love that overcomes all, or pictures the name that 
is above every name,—from which nothing shall sep- 
arate us, “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities,’—and the bearer of it seated on the right 
hand of God. Then sometimes his voice rings out, 
“like a bell with solemn, sweet vibrations,’—like that 
bell which swings in the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
and is well called “The Great Paul.’’ It seems as if 
his feeling were all intense feeling. If anger, it is 
quivering; if affection, it is almost uncontrollable; “I 
couldn’t forbear to send to you.” He longs after his 
converts, in the tender mercies of Christ. If joy, it 
is the “Third Heaven.” 

A diversified character is revealed in these epistles, 
almost too intense for his frail form. An irreparable 
loss it would be to the world if these letters should 
be destroyed. We could better forfeit any other books 
except only those which tell the story of Him whose 
Paul was, and whom he served. 


Book Four: LEADING ON TO 
REVELATION 


i 15 9 VF a oe ye 
Maat he ee it OU (Hk: 
seCoibit A ote rane ¥ 

104 eR ADM oo 





Book Four: LEADING ON TO 
REVELATION 


Chapter XXV 


Peat TANONYMOUS LETTER SFOw iit: 
HEBREWS 


“Scripture not elaborate! Scripture not ornamental 
in diction! and musical in cadence! Why consider 
the Epistle to the Hebrews—where is there in the 
classics any composition more carefully, more arti- 
ficially written?’ So speaks Cardinal Newman. 

This letter, addressed to Jewish Christians, shows a 
mastery of Greek style, a balance of sentences, a happy 
choice of words, sonorous and harmonious words, an 
aptness in comparisons, a marching dignity of thought, 
that compels respect and attention as well as stirs emo- 
tion. The writer composes in calmness and delibera- 
tion, unhurried in his Roman residence, undismayed 
by persecutions and dangers. He is a friend of Tim- 
othy and therefore a friend of Paul. He shows, in- 
deed, in his shades of thought, Paul’s influence. 

His style, however, contrasts with that of Paul in 
many particulars, the most striking of which is its 
calmness, leisure, finish. There are no sentences left 
flying at loose ends, no subjects left poised without 
predicates, no phrases and clauses heaped upon each 


other in almost endless confusion. It is the work of 
211 


212 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


a man who pays attention to form, polish and the 
rules of rhetoric. 

“Who wrote the Epistle in very truth God only 
knows,” said Origen in the first half of the third 
century; and the statement is still true. Of the epistle 
in general we may say that “like the great Melchizedek 
of sacred story, it marches forth in lonely royal and 
sacerdotal dignity, and like him is without lineage; we 
know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.” 
Various conjectures assign the authorship to Barnabas, 
to Apollos, or to other companions of St. Paul. The 
most likely of these is that Apollos is the author— 
that trained rhetorician, that polished Alexandrian, 
whom Paul welcomed so gladly to Asia Minor and 
trained more fully in Christian thought. 

The first sentence of this epistle is a contrast to the 
nervous manner of St. Paul. The carefully built struc- 
ture is stately and noble and reminds one a little of 
the style of St. Luke in his two dedications to Theo- 
philus: 


“Many were the forms and fashions in which God 
spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in 
these days at the end he has spoken to us by a Son 
—a Son whom he appointed heir of the universe, as 
it was by him that he created the world. He, reflect- 
ing God’s bright glory and stamped with God’s own 
character, sustains the universe with his word of 
power; when he had secured our purification from 
sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty 
on high; and thus he is superior to the angels, as 
he has inherited a Name superior to theirs.” 


ANONYMOUS LETTER TO THE HEBREWS 213 


After certain quotations from Hebrew scriptures 
concerning angels, and the words God spoke through 
them and of them, he begins his second chapter with 
two well-built sentences of admonition: 


“We must therefore pay closer attention to what 
we have heard, in case we drift away. For if the 
divine word spoken by angels held good, if transgres- 
sion and disobedience met with due punishment in 
every case, how shall we escape the penalty for neg- 
lecting a salvation which was originally proclaimed 
by the Lord himself and guaranteed to us by those 
who heard him.” 


Further on in the same chapter, the author, con- 
tinuing the comparison of Jesus to angels, declares 
him to have been made temporarily a little lower than 
they for his suffering and death, only to be exalted, 
crowned with glory and honor. The Hebrew people 
talked and dreamed much of angelic messengers, and 
their thought has passed over to our own time. Milton 
sings of their cohorts, rank on rank, as posting over 
land and ocean without rest, to do the bidding of their 
Lord. Edmund Spenser, in the Faérie Queene has 
dainty lines regarding them: 


“How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 
To come to succour us that succour want! 
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave 
The flitting skyes, like flying pursuivant, 
Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant! 


214 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


They for us fight, they watch, and dewly ward, 
And their bright squadrons round about us plant; 
And all for love, and nothing for reward; 
O, why should heavenly God to men have such 
regard!” 


Later the author draws a comparison between Moses 
and Jesus and shows how the sinful children of Israel 
could not “enter into his rest,’—a phrase repeatedly 
employed. Moses had not entered into the promised 
land, but entered into that rest. For his limitations, 
he died in Mount Nebo and there was buried. For 
the people of God, however, “there remaineth there- 
fore a rest.” One of the noble poems of our language, 
the Burial of Moses, by Cecil Frances Alexander, 
contains, in its closing stanza, the same thought: 


“O, lonely tomb in Moab’s land! 
O, dark Beth-peor’s hill! 
Speak to these curious hearts of ours, 
And teach them to be still: 
God hath his mysteries of grace, 
Ways that we cannot tell, 
He hides them deep, like the secret sleep 
Of him he loved so well.” 


There is a wealth of comparison, metaphor, simile, 
sparkling like well-cut gems in this epistle, to teach 
the lessons of endurance in Christ, firm as an anchored 
ship; of the mystery of personal union with Christ, 
as mysterious a matter as that prince of peace, Mel- 
chizedek, without father and without mother; of the 


ANONYMOUS LETTER TO THE HEBREWS 215 


high priesthood of Jesus who enters for all of us 
to make sacrifice behind the veil. 

How now shall we approach that great eleventh 
chapter of Hebrews, which has been called the West- 
minster Abbey of Scripture, where are enshrined the 
names of the Heroes of Faith in Hebrew annals! 
John Stuart Blackie, in his Lay Sermons, says of it: 


“Look this chapter of Hebrews freely and fully in 
the face, and see what it means as the great authorized 
interpreter of the moral history of the world, not only 
in the case of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, and 
Daniel, and Samuel, and all the prophets, but also in 
all the leading assertions of human and social dignity 
in later times, whether against sacerdotal intolerance 
in Constantinople and Rome, or political atrocity in 
Naples and Milan.” 


This monumental chapter opens with a definition of 
faith which has become embedded in our thinking. 
It is followed by a catalogue of great names that 
spans the whole arch of the Hebrew firmament, blazing 
like stars. 


“Now faith means we are confident of what we 
hope for, convinced of what we do not see. It was 
for this that the men of old won their record. It is 
by faith we understand that the world was fashioned 
by the word of God, and thus the visible was made 
out of the invisible. It was by faith that Abel offered 
God a richer sacrifice than Cain did, and thus won 
from God the record of being ‘just,’ on the score of 


216 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


what he gave; he died, but by his faith he is speaking 
to us still, It was by faith that Enoch was taken 
to heaven, so that he never died (he was not overtaken 
by death, for God had taken him away). For before 
he was taken to heaven, his record was that he had 
satisfied God; and apart from faith it is impossible 
to satisfy him, for the man who draws near to God 
must believe that he exists and that he does reward 
those who seek him. .. . 

“Tt was by faith that Abraham obeyed his call to 
go forth to a place which he would receive as an in- 
heritance; he went forth, although he did not know 
where he was to go. It was by faith that he sojourned 
in the promised land, as in a foreign country, residing 
in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were co-heirs 
with him of the same promise; he was waiting for the 
City with its fixed foundations, whose builder and 
maker is God.” 


Chapter XXVI 
THE FIERY ST. JAMES 


The author of the Epistle of James is not the brother 
of John, son of Zebedee, but is the one spoken of as 
“The Lord’s brother.” He was not one of the twelve. 
Jesus’ brethren did not believe on Him until after the 
resurrection. When James, the son of Zebedee, one 
of the Sons of Thunder, as he and John were called, 
met death under Herod Agrippa I, James, the Lord’s 
brother, became the head of the Jerusalem church. 

The Epistle of James addressed to the Dispersion, 
the Jewish Christians scattered all over the world, is 
full of hard, practical common sense. The author 
shows himself a man of affairs, a man of the world. 
“Be ye doers of the word”’ is the keynote of the Epis- 
tle. It isa letter that ought to appeal to a hard-headed 
practical day and country like ours. 

“Its style is remarkable,” declares Farrar. “It com- 
bines pure and eloquent and rhythmical Greek with 
Hebrew intensity of expression. It has all the fiery 
sternness and vehemence of the ancient prophets. It 
abounds in passionate ejaculations, rapid questions, 
graphic similitudes. It is less a letter than a moral 
harangue stamped with the lofty personality of the 
writer, and afire with his burning sincerity. ‘What a 
noble man speaks in this Epistle!’ exclaims the eloquent 
Herder. ‘Deep unbroken patience in suffering! 
Greatness in poverty! Joy in sorrow! Simplicity, 

217 


218 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


sincerity, firm direct confidence in prayer! How he 
wants action; action, not words, not dead faith! ” 

The very first word is one of cheer to those endur- 
ing trials and temptations, containing a simile of a 
white-capped surge of the sea: 


“Greet it as pure joy, my brothers, when you come 
across any sort of trial, sure that the sterling temper 
of your faith produces endurance; only, let your en- 
durance be a finished product, so that you may be 
finished and complete, with never a defect. Whoever 
of you is defective in wisdom, let him ask God who 
gives to all men without question or reproach, and 
the gift will be his. Only, let him ask in faith, with 
never a doubt; for the doubtful man is like surge of 
the sea whirled and swayed by the wind; that man 
need not imagine he will get anything from God, 
double-minded creature that he is, wavering at every 
turn.” 


In the first chapter also is a sentence which has 
embedded itself in the prayer language of the church 
for ages, both for its consciousness of the source of 
all good and also for its eloquence: 


“All we are given is good, and all our endowments 
are faultless, descending from above, from the Father 
of the heavenly lights, who knows no change of rising 
and setting, who casts no shadow on the earth.” 


The end of this chapter defines religion for us in a 
manner, if not comprehensive, at least practical and 
suggestive: 


THE FIERY ST. JAMES 219 


“Pure, unsoiled religion in the judgment of God the 
Father means this: to care for orphans and widows 
in their trouble, and to keep oneself from the stain of 
the world.”’ 


The democracy of the head of the early church 
appears in the opening words of the second chapter. 
St. James reflects the Sermon on the Mount perhaps 
more than any other New Testament writer: 


“My brothers, as you believe in our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who is the Glory, pay no servile regard to 
people. Suppose there comes into your meeting a 
man who wears gold rings and handsome clothes, and 
also a poor man in dirty clothes; if you attend to the 
wearer of the handsome clothes and say to him, ‘Sit 
here, this is a good place,’ and tell the poor man, ‘You 
can stand,’ or ‘Sit there at my feet,’ are you not draw- 
ing distinctions in your own minds and proving that 
you judge people with partiality? Listen, my beloved 
brothers, has not God chosen the poor of this world 
to be rich in faith and to inherit the realm which he 
has promised to those who love him?” 


“The Apostle of Works,’ as James is called, now 
presents the contrast between a barren and doctrinaire 
faith, and Christian works, in a practical passage that 
is famous in Christian literature and thought: 


“My brothers, what is the use of any one declaring 
he has faith, if he has no deeds to show? Can his faith 
save him? Suppose some brother or sister is ill clad 
and short of daily food; if any of you says to them, 


220 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


‘Depart in peace! Get warm, get food,’ without sup- 
plying their bodily needs, what use is that? So faith, 
unless it has deeds, is dead in itself.” 


There is a classic statement of the dangers in the 
excessive use of the human tongue, in the third chap- 
ter, which has not elsewhere been surpassed. The 
tragic truth of it we all instantly recognize: 


“We put bridles into the mouths of horses to make 
them obey us, and so, you see, we can move the whole 
of their bodies. Look at ships too; for all their size 
and speed under stiff winds, they are turned by a tiny 
rudder wherever the mind of the steersman chooses. 
So the tongue is a small member of the body, but it 
can boast of great exploits. What a forest is set 
ablaze by a little spark of fire! And the tongue is a 
fire, the tongue proves a very world of mischief among 
our members, staining the whole of the body and set- 
ting fire to the round circle of existence with a flame 
fed by hell. For while every kind of beast and bird, 
of creeping animals and creatures marine, is tameable 
and has been tamed by mankind, no man can tame the 
tongue—plague of disorder that it is, full of deadly 
venom! With the tongue we bless the Lord and 
Father, and with the tongue we curse men made in 
God’s likeness; blessing and cursing stream from the 
same lips! My brothers, this ought not to be. Does 
a fountain pour out fresh water and brackish from 
the same hole? Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear 
olives? Ora vine, figs? No more can salt water yield 
fresh.” 


THE FIERY ST. JAMES 221 


In contrast the writer sings the praises of pure 
wisdom : 


“Who among you is wise and learned? Let him 
show by his good conduct, with the modesty of wis- 
dom, what his deeds are. ... The wisdom from 
above is first of all pure, then peaceable, forbearing, 
conciliatory, full of mercy and wholesome fruit, un- 
ambiguous, straightforward; and the peacemakers who 
sow in peace reap righteousness.” 


A profound aphorism as to the real root of evil- 
doing and its origin in ignorance, which has taken 
shape in the modern definition that “‘sin is an attempt 
to realize the absurd,’ appears at the close of the 
fourth chapter: 


“But here you are, boasting in your proud preten- 
sions! All such boasting is wicked.” 


It is said that James, Bishop of Jerusalem, was an 
Ebionite, vowed to poverty and an ascetic life. He is 
pictured as wearing a simple white garment and his 
hair, unshorn according to his vow, hanging over his 
shoulders. It is to be expected therefore that he shall 
denounce riches in unmeasured terms; because the rich 
men of his time, whose actions led to the destruction 
of Jerusalem, undoubtedly deserved denunciation. 
Read the scathing words in chapter five: 


“Come now, you rich men, weep and shriek over 
your impending miseries! 


222 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


You have been storing up treasure in the very last 
days; 

your wealth lies rotting, 

and your clothes are moth-eaten; 

your gold and silver lie rusted over, 

and their rust will be evidence against you, 

it will devour your flesh like fire. 

See, the wages of which you have defrauded the 
workmen who mowed your fields call out, 

and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears 
of the Lord of Hosts. 

You have revelled on earth and plunged into dissi- 
pation ; 

you have fattened yourselves as for the Day of 
slaughter ; 

you have condemned, you have murdered the right- 
eous—unresisting.” 


Chapter XX VII 
LETTERS OF HOPR- AND LOVE 


The epistles of Peter are just what we should ex- 
pect of that impulsive and erring, loving and hoping, 
leader of the twelve, the rock apostle. 

These writings sound like Peter, look like Peter, 
feel like Peter. They are in harmony with what we 
know of his tempestuous, generous, warm-hearted and 
altogether human character. He writes from Rome, 
near the end of his life, having passed through great 
dangers, and still in great dangers, in tones thrilling 
with hope and joy. Following his address to the 
sojourning Christians everywhere, he utters this 
thanksgiving: 


“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew 
to a life of hope, through the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ from the dead, born to an unscathed, inviolate, 
unfading inheritance; it is kept in heaven for you, and 
the power of God protects you by faith till you do 
inherit the salvation which is all ready to be revealed 
at the last hour. You will rejoice then, though for 
the passing moment you may need to suffer various 
trials; that is only to prove your faith is sterling (far 
more precious than gold which is perishable and yet 
is tested by fire), and it redounds to your praise and 


glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 
223 


224 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


You never knew him but you love him; for the mo- 
ment you do not see him, but you believe in him, 
and you will thrill with an unspeakable and glorious 
joy to obtain the outcome of your faith in the salva- 
tion of your souls.”’ 


He coins, in the second chapter, that phrase, “stran- 
gers and pilgrims,” or “sojourners and exiles”: 


“Beloved, as sojourners and exiles I appeal to you 
to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage 
war upon the soul.” 


He shows his practical sense in his advice to Chris- 
tians to be subject to their rulers and even to honor 
them: 


“Submit for the Lord’s sake to any human author- _ 
ity; submit to the emperor as supreme, and to gov- 
ernors as deputed by him for the punishment of wrong- 
doers and the encouragement of honest people—for it 
is the will of God that by your honest lives you should 
silence the ignorant charges of foolish persons. Live 
like free men, only do not make your freedom a pre- 
text for misconduct; live like servants of God. Do 
honour to all, love the brotherhood, reverence God, 
honour the emperor.” 


There is no finer worldly wisdom, and no more 
needed admonition even to this day than that offered 
husbands, wives, servants, in the second and third 
chapters. 


LETTERS OF HOPE AND LOVE 225 


It is not surprising, therefore, that this man of af- 
fairs, even though the Apostle of Hope, should desire 
the disciples everywhere to be “ready with a reply for 
anyone who calls you to account for the hope you 
cherish.” 

It is not surprising, too, that he who had denied his 
Lord and had been forgiven should utter the senti- 
ment: “Love hides a host of sins.”’ 

It is not surprising, further, that he who had boasted 
that, though all men should desert Jesus, yet would 
not he, and then who had turned round, cursing and 
swearing that he did not know Him, should now say: 
“The haughty God opposes, but to the humble he gives 
grace.” 

Neither is it surprising that the impetuous apostle 
should, in the first chapter of his second epistle, sing 
the song of self-control with a catalogue of plodding 
virtues leading up to self-control and following in its 
train: 


“For this very reason, do you contrive to make it 
your whole concern to furnish your faith with reso- 
lution, resolution with intelligence, intelligence with 
self-control, self-control with stedfastness, stedfastness 
with piety, piety with brotherliness, brotherliness with 
Christian love.” 


There is a reference to the morning star in this 
same chapter: 


“We have gained fresh confirmation of the pro- 
phetic word. Pray attend to that word; it shines like 


226 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


a lamp within a darksome spot, till the Day dawns 
and the daystar rises within your hearts.’ 


Speaking of those who are subject to the dominion 
of the flesh and materialism, he makes this poetic com- 
parison in the second chapter: 


“These people are waterless fountains and mists 
driven by a squall, for whom the nether gloom of dark- 
ness is reserved.” . 


Grouped with these letters of the Apostle of Hope, 
may be placed those of the Apostle of Love, St. John. 
He it was who, as Bishop of Ephesus, growing very 
old and white, was carried into the assembly of the 
church in his later years, and from his chair gave out 
over and over the same message: “Little children, love 
one another.” 

John, the only apostle who came to a natural death, 
which Browning calls the “Death in the Desert,” the 
author of the Revelation, seen on the Isle of Patmos, 
gives us three short letters, throbbing with love. “My 
little children” is his favorite style of address to those 
to whom he writes. He affectionately addresses 
fathers and sons, speaking to the young men because 
they are strong, paying them delicate compliments. 
He hymns love in strains second only to St. Paul’s 
thirteenth of First Corinthians, considers love the key- 
note to the Christian life, believes that the passage into 
real life is through love, and details the qualities of 
love and its magic effect upon life. 

The second and third letters are personal letters, one 


LETTERS OF HOPE AND LOVE 227 


to a certain “elect lady and her children’”’ and one to 
Gaius. They express a tender personal affection. 

Finally, there is the general epistle of Jude, or Judas, 
startling in its virile, nervous style. It is filled with 
unusual comparisons, original and stimulating similes. 
Speaking of those who are sunken in the flesh and its 
desire, the writer says: 


“These people are stains on your love-feasts; they 
have no qualms about carousing in your midst, they 
look after none but themselves—rainless clouds, swept 
along by the wind, trees in autumn without fruit, 
doubly dead and so uprooted, wild waves foaming out 
their own shame, wandering stars for whom the nether 
gloom of darkness has been reserved eternally. It 
was of these, too, that Enoch the seventh from Adam 
prophesied, when he said, 


“ ‘Behold the Lord comes with myriads of his holy 
Ones vce 


For these people are murmurers, grumbling at their 
lot in life—they fall in with their own passions, their 
talk is arrogant, they pay court to men to benefit them- 
selves.” 


Chapter XXVIII 
THE GLORIES OF REVELATION 


This book, together with the book of Daniel in the 
Old Testament, has been the favorite stamping ground 
of religious faddists. All those who had some case 
to make out resorted to it for proof passages. Those 
who held special theories about the end of the world, 
the ushering in of the millennium, the world-Arma- 
geddon which is to precede it, could easily figure out 
the years from the “time, times, and half a time,” and 
identify the great characters of history, like Napoleon 
and Jefferson Davis, with the beasts and dragons 
which move through its pages. Those who held pet 
enmities against certain branches of the church or 
certain heretics in it, could always find damning ref- 
erence to their foes in its obscure but highly picturesque 
visions. 

If, however, one takes up this book with the knowl- 
edge that it had reference to the places, events, and 
persons of the day in which it was written, and does 
not in any sense attempt to forecast the future, its 
gorgeous imagery becomes fairly intelligible and pro- 
foundly attractive. If one realizes that this book came 
as a solace and as inspiration to persecuted Christians, 
when it was all one’s life was worth to bear that 
hated name; if one grasps the fact that John, the 
Apostle, now Bishop of Ephesus, veils reference to 


Nero under the guise of the beast, and Rome under 
228 


THE GLORIES OF REVELATION 229 


the name of Babylon, the mighty courtesan, at a time 
when to mention the Emperor with a slur or the 
Eternal City with criticism, was to put the writer’s 
life in jeopardy; if one tries to imagine what courage 
this bold book must have infused into fainting, and 
all but failing Christian hearts; then one can read the 
book even to-day with inspiration and hope. 

Perhaps few books in the Bible so appeal to chil- 
dren and adolescents as this one. Who does not re- 
member in childhood hearing with bated breath the 
passages about the wonderful dream city, the new 
Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven, prepared as 
a bride adorned for her husband, about the jeweled 
gates and walls, and streets of gold, about the tree 
of life and the river of the water of life clear as 
crystal, and about the throne of God and of the lamb? 
It is the wealth of concrete imagery employed which 
so captures the mind of childhood and, shall we not 
say, of all of us, and renders this book inimitable. 
The good Scotchman, in “Beside the Bonny Brier 
Bush,” felt that one ought not to waste superlative 
adjectives, but “save some for the twenty-second chap- 
ter of Revelation.” 

In order fully to appreciate this earliest produc- 
tion of St. John, the beloved, probably written during 
those strenuous days in the late sixties when Paul 
himself was beheaded at Rome, one should be familiar 
with this peculiar style of writing called the “Apoca- 
lyptic literature,” in vogue among the Jews. Ezekiel 
and Daniel have some of it; and the books that used 
to be bound in our mothers’ and fathers’ Bibles, be- 
tween the Old Testament and the New, had mutch. 


230 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


But even without such familiarity, certain passages 
of rugged grandeur appeal to us all. 

“Be faithful, though you have to die for it, and I 
will give you the crown of Life” must have rung in 
the hearts of the seven churches of Asia, at a time 
when they never knew whose turn it was next to prove 
his faith by his death. Perhaps it rang again in 
Smyrna, of late, in one of those very seven churches! 

Then the refrain, which comes in constant reitera- 
tion through the first half of the book, echoed in our 
childish hearts, and echoes still: 


“Let any one who has an ear listen to what the 
Spirit says to the churches.” 


What the Spirit said to the church at Laodicea 
might well be spoken in certain churches yet, even 
as it was spoken in other words to the church in “The 
Servant in the House.’ The words still sing in our 
ears 


“T know your doings, you are neither cold nor hot 
—would you were either cold or hot! So, because you 
are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, | am going to 
spit you out of my mouth... . Lo, I stand at the 
door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens 
the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he 
with me. “The conqueror I will allow to sit beside 
me on my throne, as I myself have conquered and sat 
down beside my Father on his throne.’ Let any one 
who has an ear listen to what the Spirit says to the 
churches,” 


THE GLORIES OF REVELATION 231 


In the next two chapters are passages which have 
passed forever into the classic music of worship like 
this refrain: 


“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty, 
who was and is and is coming.” 


Or, like this one which, sung by the great choruses 
in “The Messiah,” reverberates through the world. 
The writer seems straining every nerve to find words 
for his praise: 


“Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many 
angels round the throne and of the living Creatures 
and of the Presbyters, numbering myriads of myriads 
and thousands of thousands, crying aloud, “The slain 
Lamb deserves to receive power and wealth and wis- 
dom and might and honour and glory and blessing.’ 
And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth 
and under the earth crying, ‘Blessing and honour and 
glory and dominion for ever and ever, to him who is 
seated on the throne and to the Lamb!” 


In the sixth chapter come the four horsemen of the 
Apocalypse, images of war, pestilence, famine, death, 
which Ibafiez turned to such good account. 

Some further imagery in this chapter is too apt and 
beautiful to be lightly passed over: — 


“And when he opened the sixth seal, I looked; and 
a great earthquake took place, the sun turned black 
as sackcloth, the full moon turned like blood, the stars 
of the sky dropped to earth as a fig tree shaken by 


232 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


a gale sheds her unripe figs, the sky was swept aside 
like a scroll being folded up, and every mountain and 
island was moved out of its place.” 


In the seventh chapter, the canvas is crowded with 
vast numbers, in a passage that has endeared itself 
to discouraged and timorous Christians in all ages 
and lands. Here personal immortality and eternal 
life are set forth in language that admits of no doubt 
or hesitation. The writer has taken Jesus at his word, 
who answered once and for all the age-long question, 
if a man die shall he live again, answered it in an 
unmistakable affirmative. 

Jesus,—and indeed the entire New Testament,—no- 
where undertakes to prove immortality any more than 
he undertakes to prove God. He assumes both. He 
apparently feels that there are some truths too great 
to require proof. In his plain, matter-of-fact fashion, 
he says, “Were it not so would I have told you I 
was going to prepare a place for you?” A man wastes 
his breath and his time who tries to prove that God 
is. Indeed, no one can prove to humanity that He is 
not. So Jesus assumes Him. In the same manner 
he assumes immortality. 

He is the first of all religious teachers to speak 
without hesitation or the tremor of doubt upon this 
question. The Hebrews held but a dim hope of a 
future life. The Greeks, as through Pindar, talked 
occasionally of the “golden islands of the blest’; but 
these were only for the few, not the many. And 
Homer puts it into the mouth of one of his heroes 
in the land of Shades to bemoan his lot: 


THE GLORIES OF REVELATION 233 


“Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom; 
Nor think, he said, vain words can ease my doom. 
Better by far a weight of woes to bear, 

And in affliction breathe the vital air, 
Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread 
Than reign the sceptered monarch of the dead.” 


How sad a state is his! Contrast his condition with 
the triumphant paean of the seer of Patmos: 


“After that I looked, and there was a great host 
whom no one could count, from every nation and tribe 
and people and tongue, standing before the throne 
and before the Lamb, clad in white robes, with palm- 
branches in their hands; and they cried with a loud 
voice, “Saved by our God who is seated on the throne, 
and by the Lamb!’ And all the angels surrounded the 
throne and the Presbyters and the four living Crea- 
tures, and fell on their faces before the throne, wor- 
shipping God and crying, “Even so! Blessing and 
glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and 
power and might be to our God for ever and ever: 
Amen!’ Then one of the Presbyters addressed me, 
saying, ‘Who are these, clad in white robes? where 
have they come from?’ I said to him, ‘You know, my 
lord.’ So he told me, ‘These are the people who have 
come out of the great Distress, who washed their 
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 

For this they are now before the throne of God, 

serving him day and night within his temple, 
and he who is seated on the throne shall over- 
shadow them. 

Never again will they hunger, never again will they 

thirst, 


234 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


never shall the sun strike them, nor any scorching 
heat; 
for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be 
their shepherd, 
guiding them to fountains of living water; 
and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.’”’ 


Milton has used much of the eloquence of Revela- 
tion, St. Michael and the war of the angels, Lucifer 
falling from heaven; and our own Battle Hymn of the 
Republic gathers from John the figure of the Lord 
“trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath 
are stored.” Time would fail, however, to tell of how 
our English literature has been colored and decorated 
by the gold and the gems of Revelation. 

As he nears the close of his book, the lonely seer 
on the Isle of Patmos beholds visions of increasing 
loveliness and grandeur, and his voice swells like an 
organ. In all literature there is nothing more awe- 
inspiring, not Dante’s Inferno, not Milton’s Paradise, 
than the two final chapters of Revelation. Indeed, 
it is from these chapters, and from this entire vision 
of John, that all other rhapsodies, concerning the life 
that is to be, are derived. He beholds the celestial 
city, gem-bedecked, coming down out of heaven, 
adorned as a bride for her husband. 

He goes into detail in his description of the city; 
and if it is true that in this book John does not show 
the Greek polish that he reveals in his gospel and 
epistles of a much later day, none the less, he discovers 
a vocabulary, a knowledge of precious stones, an artis- 
tic sense, and a daring vigor and abandon that are 
startling. 


THE GLORIES OF REVELATION 235 


The music of his words swells on the ear, rich 
and full, and strangely moves the heart to its pro- 
foundest depths: 


“But I saw no temple in the City, for its temple 
is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb. And the 
City needs no sun or moon to shine upon it, for the 
glory of God illumines it, and the Lamb lights it up. 

By its light will the nations walk; 

and into it will the kings of earth bring their glories 

(the gates of it will never be shut by day, 

and night there shall be none), 

they will bring to it the glories and treasures of the 

nations. 

Nothing profane, none who practises abomination 

or falsehood shall enter, 

but those alone whose names are written in the 

Lamb’s book of Life. 

“Then he showed me the river of the water of Life, 
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and 
of the Lamb through the streets of the City; on both 
sides of the river grew the tree of Life, bearing twelve 
kinds of fruit, each month having its own fruit; and 
the leaves served to heal the nations. 

None who is accursed will be there; 

but the throne of God and the Lamb will be within it, 

his servants will serve and worship him, 

they will see his face, 

and his name will be on their foreheads. 

Night there shall be none; 

they need no lamp or sun to shine upon them, 

for the Lord God will illumine them; 

and they will reign for ever and ever.” 


Chapter XXIX 
THE LONG WAY WE HAVE COME 


It is not after all such a long way. About twenty 
years of literary activity we have traversed, a little 
over half a century of historical event. That is all. 
Both the literature and the events spring from a small, 
a very small, body of obscure people and comprise a 
very small volume. Yet the effect upon the world! 

We call these twenty-seven books, or rather pamph- 
lets, the New Testament. The phrase is not accurately 
descriptive. The word “Testament” suggests a will; 
and these books do not partake of the nature of a last 
will and testament. Rather are they the rising than 
the setting of a sun. The “New Covenant’ is sug- 
gested as a better title; but “Covenant” is a word 
now little used. It applies to treaties, agreements, con- 
tracts, and is, therefore, technical, diplomatic. In so 
far as it stands for a new rainbow of hope and promise 
spanning our heaven, it is doubtless a good word, and 
meaningful. The symbol we use to describe the first 
four books, if extended to the whole twenty-seven, 
would carry a better note—““The Gospel.” But “Tes- 
tament’”’ we have called the collection so long that 
“Testament” we shall go on calling it to the end of 
the chapter. 

We have browsed through the little library from 
first to last, taking bits of beauty here and there, but 


conscious all the time that all of it is beautiful, all of 
236 


THE LONG WAY WE HAVE COME 237 


it true. Perhaps the reader of this volume will now 
turn to the Testament and feed for himself. We 
have browsed through the plains dotted and starred 
with oriental lilies of the valley, poppies, oleanders, 
anemones, and naturally our attention has lingered 
upon these bright colors; but all the time we have felt, 
have we not, the charm of the entire valley or hillside 
where we have fed, the long green grass, the soft 
sunlight, the blue haze on distant mountain tops, the 
shimmer on lake and river. 

Not all of the fine touches in the story of Christ 
in the gospels have we seen. Indeed, we might browse 
a lifetime and not get them all. Some new and striking 
beauty gleams and glows in the tale each time we 
take it up. The “Charming Rabbi’ becomes ever more 
charming, and his words—whether of poetry, epi- 
gram, story, or direct teaching—take on new and 
larger meanings. We never tire of reading or hearing 
the story of Jesus; and new biographies of him, with 
new aids to our imagination, appear in every age and 
are acclaimed with wide popularity. Inexhaustible 
seems the store of treasure for us in his sacred person. 

Almost as deeply interesting, stimulating, encourag- 
ing to us has been the story of the rise of the church, 
the body which was destined to preserve his message, 
his spirit, his example. It is the church which grew 
logically and inevitably out of His life, death, and 
teaching, the church essential to the spread of His 
gospel through the world, the church which had to 
arise if His followers were to obey His command 
to witness for Him to the uttermost part of the earth. 

We have gathered bits here and there among the 


238 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Epistles, which carry on the story of our Christ and 
of our church. We have kept company with the great 
souls, saints, sages, heroes, martyrs who march through 
them—Paul, Apollos, Barnabas, Peter, James, John, 
Silas, Timothy, Titus. Their thoughts have become 
our thoughts, their griefs, privations, hopes, aspira- 
tions, ours. The more we know them, the better we 
shall penetrate their hearts and the better we shall 
love them. They are our friends, our brothers, as 
well as our prophets and teachers. 

Then we have stood with the aged John, whom 
Jesus loved best of all, on the Isle of Patmos, the 
isle of vision, in the blue Aegean Sea, and have be- 
held things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. In 
this apocalypse lies the germ for Dante, Milton, Ibanez, 
and a host of painters. This vision of John’s has 
caught the imagination of childhood, for it is the most 
allied of all in the Bible to fairyland and the world 
of magic. Its pure river of water of life, moreover, 
and its trees of life on this side of the river and on 
that, have comforted age and hope deferred for many 
centuries. 

This book, the New Testament, has destroyed one 
world and built another. First it honeycombed the 
foundations of old Rome, already spongy with de- 
cay, and helped to bring the structure tumbling to the 
ground. On the ruins it built western civilization. 
It incited the crusades, the revival of learning, the 
reformation; and is it too much to say that it led to 
the founding of the great democracies of the modern 
world? 

We speak of ours as a Christian civilization, and 


\ 


THE LONG WAY WE HAVE COME 239 


so, indeed, it is. All that is best in our social cus- 
toms, our amenities of life, our ethics, our very juris- 
prudence itself, rests upon the teachings of Jesus. If 
his influence were taken out of our world, Europe 
and America would be very different from what they 
are. Men do not necessarily acknowledge Him in order 
to be under His influence, and unconsciously to lead 
lives permeated by His presence. Nobody can meas- 
ure, and but few of us even imagine, the effect of 
these twenty-seven books upon the world. 

Deeply as we have been moved by the isolated pas- 
sages which, in this present study, have passed under 
our eyes, we can form no conception of the sway they 
have exercised over millions of hearts in the last two 
thousand years. They have nerved the soldier, have 
fed the traveler, have given companionship to the 
lonely pioneer plunging into wildernesses to make a 
home. They have encouraged those struggling with 
handicaps, like incurable disease, the “thorn in the 
flesh,’ to keep on working to the end. They have 
lent solace to old age, and smoothed the pillow of the 
dying. They have inspired much of the world’s 
greatest literature and art. Their service to humanity 
in supplying hope and courage can never be put into 
words. 

We lay down this little volume of twenty-seven 
pamphlets with a sigh of wonder and awe. We are 
amazed that it should ever have been produced at all. 
That it was brought into being is the miracle of all 
time, beside which all other wonders become small 
and understandable. How could any human wisdom 
have spoken the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, the 


240 THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Lord’s Prayer, the parable of the Lost Son, Paul’s 
address to the Athenians, or his hymn to love, the 
paean to heroic faith in Hebrews, and the final vision 
of Revelation? It could not have been done by human 
wisdom. It is a work of the divine spirit. 


THE END 





Date Due 


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BS535 .J52 
The beauty of the New Testament, 


Princeton Theological Seminary—Speer 


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